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Jane Street barred from Indian markets as regulator freezes $566M

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518 points bwfan123 | 1 comments | 06 Jul 25 14:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.452s | source
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MichaelNolan ◴[07 Jul 25 00:02 UTC] No.44485321[source]▶
Anyone have any recommendations for books/papers/articles (math heavy is fine) that give a good steel man argument for why options and derivatives are beneficial?

I can wrap my head around why/how options for physical commodities give price stability for sellers and buyers. But at first glance I struggle to see how derivatives are beneficial in the equity markets. The argument is that derivatives increase market efficiency (more accurate pricing) over what just a simple buy/sell market would give you right? But how valuable is this increased efficiency? Obviously is super valuable to the people who work in finance, but how valuable is it outside of that context?

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1. msgodel ◴[07 Jul 25 00:04 UTC] No.44485335[source]▶
Puts let you hedge long positions, calls let you hedge short positions. Without that you'd have to liquidate much sooner so there would be more volatility.

More abstractly derivatives let traders in one asset pay premia to offload risk to other traders who are more able to absorb it. This way everyone has what they want and the market functions more efficiently. It's very similar to insurance (and you can actually model insurance like a portfolio of long/short put+call options with a probabilistic (event dependent) multiplier.)