1.II.28J

Stochastic Financial Models
Part II, 2007

(i) What does it mean to say that a process (Mt)t0\left(M_{t}\right)_{t \geqslant 0} is a martingale? What does the martingale convergence theorem tell us when applied to positive martingales?

(ii) What does it mean to say that a process (Bt)t0\left(B_{t}\right)_{t \geqslant 0} is a Brownian motion? Show that supt0Bt=\sup _{t \geqslant 0} B_{t}=\infty with probability one.

(iii) Suppose that (Bt)t0\left(B_{t}\right)_{t \geqslant 0} is a Brownian motion. Find μ\mu such that

St=exp(x0+σBt+μt)S_{t}=\exp \left(x_{0}+\sigma B_{t}+\mu t\right)

is a martingale. Discuss the limiting behaviour of StS_{t} and E(St)\mathbb{E}\left(S_{t}\right) for this μ\mu as tt \rightarrow \infty.