The numéraire portfolio in semimartingale financial models

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Abstract: We study the existence of the numeraire portfolio under predictable convex constraints in a general semimartingale model of a financial market. The numeraire portfolio generates a wealth process, with respect to which the relative wealth processes of all other portfolios are supermartingales. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of the numeraire portfolio are obtained in terms of the triplet of predictable characteristics of the asset price process. This characterization is then used to obtain further necessary and sufficient conditions, in terms of a no-free-lunch-type notion. In particular, the full strength of the "No Free Lunch with Vanishing Risk" (NFLVR) is not needed, only the weaker "No Unbounded Profit with Bounded Risk" (NUPBR) condition that involves the boundedness in probability of the terminal values of wealth processes. We show that this notion is the minimal a-priori assumption required in order to proceed with utility optimization. The fact that it is expressed entirely in terms of predictable characteristics makes it easy to check, something that the stronger NFLVR condition lacks.


The authors consider a general semimartingale model without further mathematical assumptions. On the economic side, it is assumed that assets have their prices determined exogenously and can be traded without ``frictions: transaction costs are non-existent or negligible. The main concern is a problem of dynamic stochastic optimization: to find a trading strategy whose wealth appears ``better when compared to the wealth generated by any other strategy, in the sense that the ratio of the two processes is a supermartingale. If such a strategy exists, it is essentially unique and is called numéraire portfolio. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the numéraire portfolio to exist are derived, in terms of the triplet of predictable characteristics of the stock-price returns. A bare-hands approach is used, the assumption of finite expected log-utility is dropped entirely; no normative assumptions is imposed. It turns out that the numéraire portfolio can exist even when the classical No Arbitrage condition fails.



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