Including Jumps in the Stochastic Valuation of Freight Derivatives

Abstract

The spot freight rate processes considered in the literature for pricing forward freight agreements (FFA) and freight options usually have a particular dynamics in order to obtain the prices. In those cases, the FFA prices are explicitly obtained. However, for jump-diffusion models, an exact solution is not known for the freight options (Asian-type), in part due to the absence of a suitable valuation framework. In this paper, we consider a general jump-diffusion process to describe the spot freight dynamics and we obtain exact solutions of FFA prices for two parametric models. Moreover, we develop a partial integro-differential equation (PIDE), for pricing freight options for a general unifactorial jump-diffusion model. When we consider that the spot freight follows a geometric process with jumps, we obtain a solution of the freight option price in a part of its domain. Finally, we show the effect of the jumps in the FFA prices by means of numerical simulations.

Keywords

• spot freight rates
• freight options
• stochastic jump-diffusion process
• stochastic delay differential equation
• risk-neutral measure
• arbitrage arguments