Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives, Ninth Edition

CHAPTER 13 Binomial Trees

A useful and very popular technique for pricing an option involves constructing a binomial tree. This is a diagram representing different possible paths that might be followed by the stock price over the life of an option. The underlying assumption is that the stock price follows a random walk. In each time step, it has a certain probability of moving up by a certain percentage amount and a certain probability of moving down by a certain percentage amount. In the limit, as the time step becomes smaller, this model is the same as the Black–Scholes–Merton model we will be discussing in Chapter 15. Indeed, in the appendix to this chapter, we show that the European option price given by the binomial tree converges to ...