April 19, 2019 3:29 WSPC/INSTRUCTION FILE main International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance c World Scientific Publishing Company OPTION PRICING WITH HEAVY-TAILED DISTRIBUTIONS OF LOGARITHMIC RETURNS LASKO BASNARKOV Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, SS. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, Macedonia and Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Skopje, Macedonia lasko.basnarkov@finki.ukim.mk VIKTOR STOJKOSKI Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Skopje, Macedonia
[email protected] ZORAN UTKOVSKI Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, Germany
[email protected] LJUPCO KOCAREV Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Skopje, Macedonia and Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, SS. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, Macedonia
[email protected] Received (Day Month Year) arXiv:1807.01756v3 [q-fin.PR] 18 Apr 2019 Revised (Day Month Year) A growing body of literature suggests that heavy tailed distributions represent an ade- quate model for the observations of log returns of stocks. Motivated by these findings, here we develop a discrete time framework for pricing of European options. Probability density functions of log returns for different periods are conveniently taken to be con- volutions of the Student’s t-distribution with three degrees of freedom. The supports of these distributions are truncated in order to obtain finite values for the options. Within this framework, options with different strikes and maturities for one stock rely on a single parameter – the standard deviation of the Student’s t-distribution for unit period. We provide a study which shows that the distribution support width has weak influence on the option prices for certain range of values of the width.