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JontyJ
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Joined: May 4th, 2006, 12:24 pm

The Ito integral of a squared Brownian Motion?

May 26th, 2006, 12:13 pm

The Ito integral of BM is 1/2(Wt^T + T) at the limit, as shown by for example Shreve in his online lecture notes.Can someone tell me what the Ito integral Wt^2 dwt in the limit is please - can I find it using a similar method? The only way I can find an answer is by applying Ito's lemma to 1/3Wt^3 and rearranging.Thanks for any pointers.
 
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tibbar
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Joined: November 7th, 2005, 9:21 pm

The Ito integral of a squared Brownian Motion?

May 26th, 2006, 9:18 pm

The method you suggest is the only practical way of solving this. You "guess" what the integral will look like, then apply Ito's lemma and rearrange.
 
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marcster
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Joined: July 14th, 2002, 3:00 am

The Ito integral of a squared Brownian Motion?

May 27th, 2006, 9:02 am

..and as a complement to Tibbar's answer, it is not that surprising you should have to do this given it is the same procedure as has to be applied for non-trivial deterministic ODEs and PDEs.However, for the simple polynomial cases you mention, the guess can be highly educated indeed. The reason why you guess 1/3 (W_t)^3 in your example is that this would be the result in the deterministic case, and you know that the Ito result ends up as the deterministic result alongside a correction term due to the non-negligible square term in the expansion. Applying Ito's Lemma to the deterministic guess will make that correction term explicit.I hope this helps.