The implied volatility surface (IVS) is a fundamental building block in computational finance. We provide a survey of methodologies for constructing such surfaces. We also discuss various topics which can influence the successful construction of IVS in practice: arbitrage-free conditions in both...

Two of the most important areas in computational finance: Greeks and, respectively, calibration, are based on efficient and accurate computation of a large number of sensitivities. This paper gives an overview of adjoint and automatic differentiation (AD), also known as algorithmic...

Local volatility models are widely used to manage many exotic options in a way consistent with available market prices of vanilla options. Once calibrated, a local volatility grid can be used in numerical methods such as PDE or Monte Carlo to price and hedge exotic options consistently with...

The Implicit Function Theorem, or IFT, is a powerful tool for calculating derivatives of functions that solve inverse, i.e. calibration, problems prevalent in financial applications. It is commonly believed that a degree of manual intervention is required to enable financial code to take...

Monte Carlo simulation or probability simulation is a technique used to understand the impact of risk and uncertainty in financial and other forecasting models. It is very useful when complex financial instruments need to be priced. Exotic options are listed on the JSE on its Can-Do platform....

We introduce a new method of optimising the accuracy and time taken to calculate risk for a complex trading book, focusing on the use case of XVA. We dynamically choose the number of paths and time discretisation to target computational effort on calculations that give the most information in...

Credit Value Adjustment sensitivities represent the quantitative basis for the full spectrum of steering activities of CVA desks: hedging, control, explanation and forecasting. In realistic applications, typically involving large numbers of market risk-factors, calculation of CVA Greeks poses...

A method to price American-style option contracts in a limited information framework is introduced. The pricing methodology is based on sequential Monte Carlo techniques, as presented in Doucet, de Freitas, and Gordon's text "Sequential Monte Carlo Methods in Practice", and the least-squares...

We introduce a new method to price American-style options on underlying investments governed by stochastic volatility (SV) models. The method does not require the volatility process to be observed. Instead, it exploits the fact that the optimal decision functions in the corresponding dynamic...

The aim of this paper consists of valuating a real biotechnology firm that is based on a portfolio of several drug development projects at different phases. They are patentprotected R&D projects and their values are obtained by implementing an extension of the real options approach in Schwartz...