There are no known exact formulas for the valuation of a number of exotic options, and this is particularly true for options under discrete monitoring and for American style options. Therefore, one usually recourses to a Monte Carlo Simulation approach, amongst other numerical methods, to estimate the value of these options. The problem which then arises with this method is one of variance reduction. Control variates are often used, and we present some results concerning these control variables, for the valuation of Asian and lookback options. An inequality on functions of correlations useful for comparing estimators in variance reduction procedures is also provided.
In this paper we develop numerical pricing methodologies for European style Exchange Options written on a pair of correlated assets, in a market with finite liquidity. In contrast to the standard multi-asset Black-Scholes framework, trading in our market model has a direct impact on the asset's price. The price impact is incorporated into the dynamics of the first asset through a specific trading strategy, as in large trader liquidity model. Two-dimensional Milstein scheme is implemented to simulate the pair of assets prices. The option value is numerically estimated by Monte Carlo with the Ma…
This paper considers the valuation of exotic path-dependent options in Lévy models, in particular options on the supremum and the infimum of the asset price process. Using the Wiener--Hopf factorization, we derive expressions for the analytically extended characteristic function of the supremum and the infimum of a Lévy process. Combined with general results on Fourier methods for option pricing, we provide formulas for the valuation of one-touch options, lookback options and equity default swaps in Lévy models.
In this paper we extend Buchen's method to develop a new technique for pricing of some exotic options with several expiry dates(more than 3 expiry dates) using a concept of higher order binary option. At first we introduce the concept of higher order binary option and then provide the pricing formulae of $n$-th order binaries using PDE method. After that, we apply them to pricing of some multiple-expiry exotic options such as Bermudan option, multi time extendable option, multi shout option and etc. Here, when calculating the price of concrete multiple-expiry exotic options, we do not try to g…
We investigate the approximation of path functionals. In particular, we advocate the use of the Karhunen-Loève expansion, the continuous analogue of Principal Component Analysis, to extract relevant information from the image of a functional. Having accurate estimate of functionals is of paramount importance in the context of exotic derivatives pricing, as presented in the practical applications. Specifically, we show how a simulation-based procedure, which we call the Karhunen-Loève Monte Carlo (KLMC) algorithm, allows fast and efficient computation of the price of path-dependent options. We …
A common approach to valuing exotic options involves choosing a model and then determining its parameters to fit the volatility surface as closely as possible. We refer to this as the model calibration approach (MCA). A disadvantage of MCA is that some information in the volatility surface is lost during the calibration process and the prices of exotic options will not in general be consistent with those of plain vanilla options. We consider an alternative approach where the structure of the user's preferred model is preserved but points on the volatility are features input to a neural network…
There is a vast literature on numerical valuation of exotic options using Monte Carlo, binomial and trinomial trees, and finite difference methods. When transition density of the underlying asset or its moments are known in closed form, it can be convenient and more efficient to utilize direct integration methods to calculate the required option price expectations in a backward time-stepping algorithm. This paper presents a simple, robust and efficient algorithm that can be applied for pricing many exotic options by computing the expectations using Gauss-Hermite integration quadrature applied …
We propose a novel algorithm which allows to sample paths from an underlying price process in a local volatility model and to achieve a substantial variance reduction when pricing exotic options. The new algorithm relies on the construction of a discrete multinomial tree. The crucial feature of our approach is that -- in a similar spirit to the Brownian Bridge -- each random path runs backward from a terminal fixed point to the initial spot price. We characterize the tree in two alternative ways: in terms of the optimal grids originating from the Recursive Marginal Quantization algorithm and f…
We consider the problem of estimating $\mathbb{E} [f(U^1, \ldots, U^d)]$, where $(U^1, \ldots, U^d)$ denotes a random vector with uniformly distributed marginals. In general, Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) is a powerful tool for solving this kind of high-dimensional numerical integration problem. In the case of dependent components of the random vector $(U^1, \ldots, U^d)$ one can achieve more accurate results by using Latin hypercube sampling with dependence (LHSD). We state a central limit theorem for the $d$-dimensional LHSD estimator, by this means generalising a result of Packham and Schm…
Analytic approximation for Bachelier option prices and applications
Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Barcelona School of Economics（经济与商业系，庞培法布拉大学及巴塞罗那经济学校）；Departament de Matemàtica Econòmica, Financera i Actuarial, Universitat de Barcelona（经济、金融与精算数学系，巴塞罗那大学）
In this paper we extend discrete time semi-static trading strategies by also allowing for dynamic trading in a finite amount of options, and we study the consequences for the model-independent super-replication prices of exotic derivatives. These include duality results as well as a precise characterization of pricing rules for the dynamically tradable options triggering an improvement of the price bounds for exotic derivatives in comparison with the conventional price bounds obtained through the martingale optimal transport approach.
In this paper we investigate model-independent bounds for exotic options written on a risky asset. Based on arguments from the theory of Monge-Kantorovich mass-transport we establish a dual version of the problem that has a natural financial interpretation in terms of semi-static hedging. In particular we prove that there is no duality gap.
Stochastic volatility (SV) and local stochastic volatility (LSV) processes can be used to model the evolution of various financial variables such as FX rates, stock prices, and so on. Considerable efforts have been devoted to pricing derivatives written on underliers governed by such processes. Many issues remain, though, including the efficacy of the standard alternating direction implicit (ADI) numerical methods for solving SV and LSV pricing problems. In general, the amount of required computations for these methods is very substantial. In this paper we address some of these issues and prop…
In this paper we propose an efficient method to compute the price of multi-asset American options, based on Machine Learning, Monte Carlo simulations and variance reduction technique. Specifically, the options we consider are written on a basket of assets, each of them following a Black-Scholes dynamics. In the wake of Ludkovski's approach (2018), we implement here a backward dynamic programming algorithm which considers a finite number of uniformly distributed exercise dates. On these dates, the option value is computed as the maximum between the exercise value and the continuation value, whi…
We study Vanna-Volga methods which are used to price first generation exotic options in the Foreign Exchange market. They are based on a rescaling of the correction to the Black-Scholes price through the so-called `probability of survival' and the `expected first exit time'. Since the methods rely heavily on the appropriate treatment of market data we also provide a summary of the relevant conventions. We offer a justification of the core technique for the case of vanilla options and show how to adapt it to the pricing of exotic options. Our results are compared to a large collection of indica…
Barrier options are one of the most widely traded exotic options on stock exchanges. In this paper, we develop a new stochastic simulation method for pricing barrier options and estimating the corresponding execution probabilities. We show that the proposed method always outperforms the standard Monte Carlo approach and becomes substantially more efficient when the underlying asset has high volatility, while it performs better than multilevel Monte Carlo for special cases of barrier options and underlying assets. These theoretical findings are confirmed by numerous simulation results.
Weighted Monte Carlo prices exotic options calibrating the probabilities of previously generated paths by a regular Monte Carlo to fit a set of option premiums. When only vanilla call and put options and forward prices are considered, the Martingale condition might not be preserved. This paper shows that this is indeed the case and overcomes the problem by adding additional synthetic options. A robust, fast and easy-to-implement calibration algorithm is presented. The results are illustrated with a geometric cliquet option which shows how the price impact can be significant.
We show that deliberately introducing a nested simulation stage can lead to significant variance reductions when comparing two stopping times by Monte Carlo. We derive the optimal number of nested simulations and prove that the algorithm is remarkably robust to misspecifications of this number. The method is applied to several problems related to Bermudan/American options. In these applications, our method allows to substantially increase the efficiency of other variance reduction techniques, namely, Quasi-Control Variates and Multilevel Monte Carlo.
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have recently also been applied to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). In this work, the classical problem of pricing European and American financial options, based on the corresponding PDE formulations, is studied. Instead of using numerical techniques based on finite element or difference methods, we address the problem using ANNs in the context of unsupervised learning. As a result, the ANN learns the option values for all possible underlying stock values at future time points, based on the minimization of a suitable loss function. For the European…
Option valuation problems are often solved using standard Monte Carlo (MC) methods. These techniques can often be enhanced using several strategies especially when one discretizes the dynamics of the underlying asset, of which we assume follows a diffusion process. We consider the combination of two methodologies in this direction. The first is the well-known multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method, which is known to reduce the computational effort to achieve a given level of mean square error relative to MC in some cases. Sequential Monte Carlo (or the particle filter (PF)) methods have also bee…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods have successfully been used in many applications in engineering, statistics and physics. However, these are seldom used in financial option pricing literature and practice. This paper presents SMC method for pricing barrier options with continuous and discrete monitoring of the barrier condition. Under the SMC method, simulated asset values rejected due to barrier condition are re-sampled from asset samples that do not breach the barrier condition improving the efficiency of the option price estimator; while under the standard Monte Carlo many simulated ass…
Pricing and hedging exotic options using local stochastic volatility models drew a serious attention within the last decade, and nowadays became almost a standard approach to this problem. In this paper we show how this framework could be extended by adding to the model stochastic interest rates and correlated jumps in all three components. We also propose a new fully implicit modification of the popular Hundsdorfer and Verwer and Modified Craig-Sneyd finite-difference schemes which provides second order approximation in space and time, is unconditionally stable and preserves positivity of the…
We investigate the use of Malliavin calculus in order to calculate the Greeks of multidimensional complex path-dependent options by simulation. For this purpose, we extend the formulas employed by Montero and Kohatsu-Higa to the multidimensional case. The multidimensional setting shows the convenience of the Malliavin Calculus approach over different techniques that have been previously proposed. Indeed, these techniques may be computationally expensive and do not provide flexibility for variance reduction. In contrast, the Malliavin approach exhibits a higher flexibility by providing a class …
