On magnitude, asymptotics and duration of drawdowns for L\'{e}vy models

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the size, asymptotic behavior, and duration of drawdowns in Lévy processes, providing new insights into their statistical properties and robustness, with implications for financial risk management.

Contribution

It introduces new asymptotic results for drawdowns in spectrally negative Lévy processes and derives the law of drawdown duration considering general process structures.

Findings

Asymptotics of drawdown magnitude are robust to positive jumps.

Derived the law of drawdown duration for a broad class of Lévy processes.

Results have implications for risk assessment in fund management.

Abstract

This paper considers magnitude, asymptotics and duration of drawdowns for some L\'{e}vy processes. First, we revisit some existing results on the magnitude of drawdowns for spectrally negative L\'{e}vy processes using an approximation approach. For any spectrally negative L\'{e}vy process whose scale functions are well-behaved at $0+$, we then study the asymptotics of drawdown quantities when the threshold of drawdown magnitude approaches zero. We also show that such asymptotics is robust to perturbations of additional positive compound Poisson jumps. Finally, thanks to the asymptotic results and some recent works on the running maximum of L\'{e}vy processes, we derive the law of duration of drawdowns for a large class of L\'{e}vy processes (with a general spectrally negative part plus a positive compound Poisson structure). The duration of drawdowns is also known as the "Time to Recover" (TTR) the historical maximum, which is a widely used performance measure in the fund management industry. We find that the law of duration of drawdowns qualitatively depends on the path type of the spectrally negative component of the underlying L\'{e}vy process.