Certain exotic options cannot be valued using closed-form solutions or even by numerical methods assuming constant volatility. Many exotics are priced in a local volatility framework. Pricing under local volatility has become a field of extensive research in finance, and various models are...

The valuation of options and many other derivative instruments requires an estimation of exante or forward looking volatility. This paper adopts a Bayesian approach to estimate stock price volatility. We find evidence that overall Bayesian volatility estimates more closely approximate the...

Since their introduction, quanto options have steadily gained popularity. Matching Black-Scholes-type pricing models and, more recently, a fat-tailed, normal tempered stable variant have been established. The objective here is to empirically assess the adequacy of quanto-option pricing models....

We address a number of technical problems with the popular Practitioner Black-Scholes (PBS) method for valuing options. The method amounts to a two-stage procedure in which fitted values of implied volatilities (IV) from a linear regression are plugged into the Black-Scholes formula to obtain...

In this paper, we focus on two-factor lattices for general diffusion processes with state-dependent volatilities. Although it is common knowledge that branching probabilities must be between zero and one in a lattice, few methods can guarantee lattice feasibility, referring to the property that...

In this paper, the Heston-Nandi futures option pricing model is applied to Bitcoin futures options. The model prices are compared to market prices to give an indication of the pricing performance. In addition, a multivariate Bitcoin futures option pricing methodology based on a multivatiate...

This paper proposes a new method for pricing American options that uses importance sampling to reduce estimator bias and variance in simulation-and-regression based methods. Our suggested method uses regressions under the importance measure directly, instead of under the nominal measure as is...

The behavior of the optimal exercise price of American puts near expiry has been well studied under the Black-Scholes model as a result of a series of publications. However, the behavior of the optimal exercise price under a stochastic volatility model, such as the Heston model, has not been...

We present the Generalized Gamma (GG) distribution as a possible risk neutral distribution (RND) for modeling European options prices under Heston's stochastic volatility (SV) model. We demonstrate that under a particular reparametrization, this distribution, which is a member of the...

Recently it was shown that the estimated American call prices obtained with regression and simulation based methods can be significantly improved on by using put-call symmetry. This paper extends these results and demonstrates that it is also possible to significantly reduce the variance of the...