June 14-15, 2006: Option-pricing with Stochastic Volatility and Jumps.

Fri Jun 2 16:10:47 CEST 2006: Literature links will appear later.

Local volatilty/implied modelling (Wednesday)
Textbook presentation: Wilmott; especially Section 22.6. To derive eqn. 22.6 (called the Dupire equation) we'll need the Kolmogorov forward or Fokker-Plank eqn. from Prop. 5.12 in Bjørk. The gory details of eqn. (22.7) are here.
The ideas were developed simultaneously and independently in Useful stregthenings were given in Andersen & Brotherton-Ratchliffe, "The implicit equity option volatility smile: an implicit finite difference approach", Jo Computational Finance 1997

The idea is to make (local) volatilty a function of time and stock-price itself, sigma = sigma(S(t),t) and then back out the functional form from observed option prices. Like interest rate model calibration (ie. same conceptual inconsistencies) but "taken up a notch" (ie. harder/better math!).

Stochastic volatility. (Wednesday)
A nice semi-specific case of Bjørk's Chapter 15 (or "like 21") on non-traded underlyings. Follows the idea of this exercise 10.2. Explict models; semi-closed solutions. The idea is using a conditioning argument based on "The Useful Rule": If X (a random variable) is independent of F (a sigma-algebra), and Y (another random variable) is F-measurable, then E(g(X,Y)| F) = E(g(X,y))|_(y=Y)
A benchmark model w/ closed-form solution: The Heston Model Or sort of closed-form solution: Up to integral that must be found numerically; the inversion af a Fourier transform or characteristic function. The trick to proving this is very similar to what we did for affine term structure models. My R-implementation of Hestons call-price formula. (This code is actually more general and includes jumps. Just put the J-parameters and lambda = 0.) And here is a little code to plot implied volatility smiles/skews etc.


Jumps. (Thursday from 11 'till we can't take it anymore.)
The fundamental buliding block is the Poisson process. The is a stochastic process, {N(t)}_t that may be characterized by any of the follwing properties Other issues Literature: Rama Cont & Peter Tankov (2004) Financial Modelling with Jumps Sections 2.5-6, Ch. 8. and much more. Highly recommended book. Buy it.

Option pricing: The original is Merton 76; the "quick and dirty" (but effective -- as almost always) is Wilmott. Option pricing and transform methods: The whole thing put together in one neat package! The Bakshi/Cao/Chen or the Bates model. .