Hedging Dynamic Fund Protection: A Static Versus Dynamic Comparison

The static nature of the downside protection offered by a standard Put option can motivate investors to use exotic option contracts like dynamic fund protection (DFP), which protects the underlying asset value throughout its life. DFP has a path-dependent payoff structure with its terminal payoff depending on the terminal asset price, the strike price and the minimum price level attained by the asset over the contract tenor. This makes DFP a contract strikingly similar to a Lookback Call option. In this article, we try to borrow the respective strengths from a dynamic and a static hedging strategy, formulate a semi-static hedging procedure for DFP and compare the hedging effectiveness of this procedure with a standard delta hedging strategy. Given the payoff resemblance between a DFP and a Lookback Call, we also seek to verify Tompkins (2002, Journal of Risk Finance, 3(4), 6–34) conclusion, which objectively shows that a dynamic procedure performs better in hedging a Lookback Call option both with and without transaction cost. Using simulated underlying price paths, we perform the delta hedging on DFP based on the closed-form pricing formula given by Gerber and Pafumi (2000, North American Actuarial Journal, 4(2), 28–37) and compare the hedge performance results with its static hedge counterpart.