Overview
MATH5965 is an honours and postgraduate mathematics course.
Units of credit: 6
Cycle of offering: Term 1
Graduate attributes: The course will enhance your research, inquiry and analytical thinking abilities.
More information: The Course outline will be made available closer to the start of term - please visit this website: www.unsw.edu.au/course-outlines
Important additional information as of 2023
UNSW Plagiarism Policy
The University requires all students to be aware of its policy on plagiarism.
For courses convened by the School of Mathematics and Statistics no assistance using generative AI software is allowed unless specifically referred to in the individual assessment tasks.
If its use is detected in the no assistance case, it will be regarded as serious academic misconduct and subject to the standard penalties, which may include 00FL, suspension and exclusion.
The online handbook entry contains up-to-date timetabling information.
If you are currently enrolled in MATH5965, you can log into UNSW Moodle for this course.
Course overview
The course provides an overview of the most important classes of financial contracts that are traded either on exchanges or over-the-counter between financial institutions and their clients. In particular, we discuss options of European and American style, futures contracts and forward contracts.
The basic ideas of arbitrage pricing within the set-up of a one-period model are introduced. In the next step, we analyse the valuation and hedging of European and American options and general contingent claims in the framework of the classic Cox-Ross-Rubinstein (CRR) binomial model of the stock price. We also show how to derive the famous Black-Scholes options pricing formula as the limit of CRR prices.
Finally, a general theory of arbitrage-free discrete-time models of spot and futures markets is presented. In particular, we prove the so-called fundamental theorems of asset pricing (FTAP) for finite models of security markets. The first FTAP establishes the equivalence between the no-arbitrage property of a security market model and the existence of a martingale measure. The second FTAP shows that the model completeness can be characterised in terms of the uniqueness of a martingale measure. These two results furnish a theoretical underpinning of the modern theory of derivatives pricing in stochastic models of security markets.
The course is a prerequisite for MATH5816 Continuous Time Financial Modelling.