Abstract
Hedging performance for index options on SPX in US and TXO in Taiwan is empirically studied in this paper. Daily hedging costs include transaction costs and taxes. Profit and loss (P/L) and Sharpe ratio are employed to measure the hedging performance. Focusing on elimination of the market price risk and volatility risk, tested hedging strategies include the delta hedging, an adjusted delta hedging, and the delta-gamma hedging, possibly combined with three volatility estimations from the historical volatility, the instantaneous volatility, and the implied volatility. In particular, the instantaneous volatility is estimated by a new nonparametric method; namely, the (corrected) Fourier transform method. It is worth noting that these hedging strategies and volatility estimations do not depend on any specific model of volatility dynamics. Hence the proposed hedging mechanisms are robust. Our finding documents that hedging performances in SPX and TXO are significantly different and the volatility risk in TXO is higher than SPX.