Stochastic volatility asymptotics of stock loans: Valuation and optimal stopping

A stock loan, or equity security lending service, is a loan which uses stocks as collateral. The borrower has the right to repay the principal with interest and regain the stock, or make no repayment and surrender the stock. Therefore, the valuation of stock loan is an optimal stopping problem related to a perpetual American option with a negative effective interest rate. The negative effective interest rate makes standard techniques for perpetual American option pricing failure. Using a fast mean-reverting stochastic volatility model, we applied a perturbation technique to the free-boundary value problem for the stock loan price. An analytical pricing formula and optimal exercise boundary are derived by means of asymptotic expansion. (c) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.