The multi-dimensional Stochastic Stefan Financial Model for a portfolio of assets

Abstract

The financial model proposed in this work involves the liquidation process of a portfolio of n assets through sell or (and) buy orders placed, in a logarithmic scale, at a (vectorial) price with volatility. We present the rigorous mathematical formulation of this model in a financial setting resulting to an n-dimensional outer parabolic Stefan problem with noise. The moving boundary encloses the areas of zero trading, the so-called solid phase. We will focus on a case of financial interest when one or more markets are considered. In particular, our aim is to estimate for a short time period the areas of zero trading, and their diameter which approximates the minimum of the n spreads of the portfolio assets for orders from the n limit order books of each asset respectively. In dimensions n = 3, and for zero volatility, this problem stands as a mean field model for Ostwald ripening, and has been proposed and analyzed by Niethammer in [25], and in [7] in a more general setting. There in, when the initial moving boundary consists of well separated spheres, a first order approximation system of odes had been rigorously derived for the dynamics of the interfaces and the asymptotic pro le of the solution. In our financial case, we propose a spherical moving boundaries approach where the zero trading area consists of a union of spherical domains centered at portfolios various prices, while each sphere may correspond to a different market; the relevant radii represent the half of the minimum spread. We apply It^o calculus and provide second order formal asymptotics for the stochastic version dynamics, written as a system of stochastic differential equations for the radii evolution in time. A second order approximation seems to disconnect the financial model from the large diffusion assumption for the trading density. Moreover, we solve the approximating systems numerically.