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Perpetual swaps are derivative contracts that allow traders to speculate on, or hedge, the price movements of cryptocurrencies. Unlike futures contracts, perpetual swaps have no settlement or expiration in the traditional sense. The funding rate acts as the mechanism that tethers the perpetual swap to its underlying with the help of arbitrageurs. Open interest, in the context of perpetual swaps and derivative contrac…
We study seven major crypto-perpetual liquidation cascades (2022-2025), and in the largest of them we can watch the mechanism directly. From the on-chain fill log of a fully transparent venue we measure the branching ratio of that event -- the October 2025 crash, the largest on record -- in flight, with both of its factors observed and no free constants. It ran deeply subcritical: the structural ratio and the amplifi…
We study time-zero efficiency of electricity derivatives markets. By time-zero efficiency is meant a sequence of prices of derivatives contracts having the same underlying asset but different times to maturity which implies that prices comply with a set of efficiency conditions that prevent profitable time-zero arbitrage opportunities. We investigate whether statistical tests, based on the law of one price, and tradi…
Kalshi's multivariate-event architecture produces market objects on demand from exact selected legs. Across a registered seven-day interval, 190 independently validated temporal shards yield 7,611,594 unique REST MVE market tickers after excluding 5,777 boundary-overlap observations; the population was created at an average rate of 1.087 million objects per day, with strong hourly burstiness. The hierarchy is sharply…
In this paper, we analyze traders' behavior within both centralized exchanges (CEXs) and decentralized exchanges (DEXs), focusing on the volatility of Bitcoin prices and the trading activity of investors engaged in perpetual future contracts. We categorize the architecture of perpetual future exchanges into three distinct models, each exhibiting unique patterns of trader behavior in relation to trading volume, open i…
This research presents a novel approach to predicting option movements by analyzing residual transactions, which are trades that deviate from standard hedging activities. Unlike traditional methods that primarily focus on open interest and trading volume, this study argues that residuals can reveal nuanced insights into institutional sentiment and strategic positioning. By examining these deviations, the model identi…
This paper examines the determinants of the volatility of futures prices and basis for three commodities: gold, oil and bitcoin -- often dubbed solid, liquid and digital gold -- by using contract-by-contract analysis which has been previously applied to crude oil futures volatility investigations. By extracting the spot and futures daily prices as well as the maturity, trading volume and open interest data for the th…
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a useful tool when trying to construct factor models from historical asset returns. For the implied volatilities of U.S. equities there is a PCA-based model with a principal eigenportfolio whose return time series lies close to that of an overarching market factor. The authors show that this market factor is the index resulting from the daily compounding of a weighted average of …
We coin the term *Protocols for Loanable Funds (PLFs)* to refer to protocols which establish distributed ledger-based markets for loanable funds. PLFs are emerging as one of the main applications within Decentralized Finance (DeFi), and use smart contract code to facilitate the intermediation of loanable funds. In doing so, these protocols allow agents to borrow and save programmatically. Within these protocols, inte…
Explicitly taking into account the risk incurred when borrowing at a shorter tenor versus lending at a longer tenor ("roll-over risk"), we construct a stochastic model framework for the term structure of interest rates in which a frequency basis (i.e. a spread applied to one leg of a swap to exchange one floating interest rate for another of a different tenor in the same currency) arises endogenously. This rollover r…
Over the last decade, dividends have become a standalone asset class instead of a mere side product of an equity investment. We introduce a framework based on polynomial jump-diffusions to jointly price the term structures of dividends and interest rates. Prices for dividend futures, bonds, and the dividend paying stock are given in closed form. We present an efficient moment based approximation method for option pri…
Pricing extremely long-dated liabilities market consistently deals with the decline in liquidity of financial instruments on long maturities. The aim is to quantify the uncertainty of rates up to maturities of a century. We assume that the interest rates follow the affine mean-reverting Vasicek model. We model parameter uncertainty by Bayesian distributions over the parameters. The cross-sectional and time series par…
Persistent shifts in term-structure dynamics undermine the stability of single-regime models in long samples. We develop an arbitrage-free regime-switching generalized CIR (RS-GCIR) model that jointly prices the Chinese government bond (CGB) curve and corporate bond curves. To capture the systematic transmission from interest-rate conditions to credit spreads, we structure the model into two blocks and price corporat…
The financial industry has undergone a significant transition from the London Interbank Offered Rates (LIBORs) to Risk Free Rates (RFRs) such as, e.g., the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) in the U.S. and the Cash Rate (AONIA) in Australia, as primary benchmark rates for borrowing costs. The paper examines the pricing and hedging method for financial products in a cross-currency framework with the special emph…
In this paper, we consider a generic interest rate market in the presence of roll-over risk, which generates spreads in spot/forward term rates. We do not require classical absence of arbitrage and rely instead on a minimal market viability assumption, which enables us to work in the context of the benchmark approach. In a Markovian setting, we extend the control theoretic approach of Gombani & Runggaldier (2013) and…
1. INTRODUCTION During the financial crisis of 2007-09, particularly around the time of the Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers failures, it became apparent that weaknesses existed in the design of the U.S. tri-party repo market, used by major broker-dealers to finance their inventories of securities. These design weaknesses had the potential to rapidly elevate and propagate systemic risk. Following the crisis, an indus…
Fixed income has received far less attention than equity portfolio optimisation since Markowitz' original work of 1952, partly as a result of the need to model rates and credit risk. We argue that the shape of the efficient frontier is mainly controlled by linear constraints, with the standard deviation relatively unimportant, and propose a two-factor model for its time evolution.
The market practice of extrapolating different term structures from different instruments lacks a rigorous justification in terms of cash flows structure and market observables. In this paper, we integrate our previous consistent theory for pricing under credit, collateral and funding risks into term structure modelling, integrating the origination of different term structures with such effects. Under a number of ass…
Which expiry you hold and when you roll is a first-class P&L — not an operations footnote — especially in commodities and VIX.
Options Open Interest — Outstanding contracts revealing crowd positioning and potential gamma walls.