Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Diversification And Market Neutral Portfolios In S&P500, Alan S. Agnew

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Our goal is to investigate strategies to deal with the risks associated with holding asset in the stock market. We first deal with risk of holding a specific stock, by the use of diversification. Later, we’ll attempt to deal with the market risk, which is the risk of entire market going up and down. Data used in this project comes from daily adjusted closing price of stocks listed in the S&P500 index ranging from January 3^rd, 2000 to December 31^st, 2015 and the data is processed using statistical software R.

Sections 2 through 4 of this …

Comparison Of Option Price From Black-Scholes Model To Actual Values, Matthew J. Krznaric

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Black-Scholes model is a widely used method for pricing European-style options in a straightforward way, through the use of calculations and ideal market assumptions. Due to certain unrealistic ideal conditions exercised by the model, The Black-Scholes technique of pricing options may not be entirely accurate in implementation. This paper addresses these problems due to the model limitations, determining how The Black-Scholes method compares to the results when using the actual data. Using a mix of historical S&P500 data and generated normal distributions, we first calculated and graphed option prices through the Black-Scholes formulas. With the help of R, we …