A Study of Black–Scholes Model’s Applicability in Indian Capital Markets

Abstract

Derivative trading, started in mid-2000, has become an integral and significant part of Indian stock market. The tremendous increase in trading volume in Indian stock market has reflected into high volatility in the option prices. The pricing of options is very complex aspect of applied finance and has been subject of extensive research. Black–Scholes option model is a scientific pricing model which is applied for determining the fair price for option contracts. This article examines if Black–Scholes option pricing model (BSOPM) is a good indicator of option pricing in Indian context. The literature review highlights that various studies have been conducted on BSOPM in various stock exchange across the world with mixed outcome on its relevance and applicability. This article is an empirical study to test the relevance of BSOPM for which 10 most popular industry’s stock listed on National Stock Exchange have been taken. Then the BSOPM has been applied using volatility and risk-free rate. Furthermore, t-test has been used to test the hypothesis and determine the significant relationship between BS model values and actual model values. This study concludes that BSOPM involves significant degree of mispricing. Hence, this model alone cannot be adopted as an indicator for option pricing. The variation from market price is synchronised with respect to moneyness and time to maturity of the option.