Authors: Jingzhi Tie Hanqin Zhang Qing Zhang
Publish Date: 2017/01/30
Volume: 179, Issue: 2, Pages: 654-675
Abstract
This paper is concerned with an optimal strategy for simultaneously trading of a pair of stocks The idea of pairs trading is to monitor their price movements and compare their relative strength over time A pairs trade is triggered by their prices divergence and consists of a pair of positions to short the strong stock and to long the weak one Such a strategy bets on the reversal of their price strengths From the viewpoint of technical tractability typical pairstrading models usually assume a difference of the stock prices satisfies a meanreversion equation In this paper we consider the optimal pairstrading problem by allowing the stock prices to follow general geometric Brownian motions The objective is to trade the pairs over time to maximize an overall return with a fixed commission cost for each transaction The optimal policy is characterized by threshold curves obtained by solving the associated HJB equations Numerical examples are included to demonstrate the dependence of our trading rules on various parameters and to illustrate how to implement the results in practice
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