Numéraire portfolio, Semimartingale, Predictable characteristics, Free lunch, Supermartingale deflator, Log-utility, 60H05, 60H30, 91B28, G11,

An equity market is called “diverse” if no single stock is ever allowed to dominate the entire market in terms of relative capitalization. In the context of the standard Itô-process model initiated by Samuelson (1965) we formulate this property (and the allied, successively weaker notions of “weak diversity” and “asymptotic weak diversity”) in precise terms. We show that diversity is possible to achieve, but delicate. Several examples are provided which illustrate these notions and show that weakly-diverse markets contain relative arbitrage opportunities: it is possible to outperform or underperform such markets over any given time-horizon. The existence of this type of relative arbitrage does not interfere with the development of contingent claim valuation, and has consequences for the pricing of long-term warrants and for put-call parity. Several open questions are suggested for further study. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2005Financial markets, portfolios, diversity, relative arbitrage, order statistics, local times, stochastic differential equations, strict local martingales,

We study a continuous-time financial market with continuous price processes under model uncertainty, modeled via a family P of possible physical measures. A robust notion NA 1 (P) of no-arbitrage of the first kind is introduced; it postulates that a nonnegative, nonvanishing claim cannot be superhedged for free by using simple trading strategies. Our first main result is a version of the fundamental theorem of asset pricing: NA 1 (P) holds if and only if every P ∈ P admits a martingale measure which is equivalent up to a certain lifetime. The second main result provides the existence of optimal superhedging strategies for general contingent claims and a representation of the superhedging price in terms of martingale measures.

In a semimartingale financial market model, it is shown that there is equivalence between absence of arbitrage of the first kind (a weak viability condition) and the existence of a strictly positive process that acts as a local martingale deflator on nonnegative wealth processes.

This work aims at a deeper understanding of the mathematical implications of the economically-sound condition of absence of arbitrages of the first kind in a financial market. In the spirit of the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing (FTAP), it is shown here that absence of arbitrages of the first kind in the market is equivalent to the existence of a finitely additive probability, weakly equivalent to the original and only locally countably additive, under which the discounted wealth processes become "local martingales". The aforementioned result is then used to obtain an independent proof of the classical FTAP, as it appears in [7]. Finally, an elementary and short treatment of the previous discussion is presented for the case of continuous-path semimartingale asset-price processes.