Volatility clustering, long-range dependence, non-Gaussianity and anomalous scaling are all well-known stylized facts of financial assets return dynamics. These elements have a relevant impact on the aptness of models for the pricing of options written on financial assets. We make us of a model...

The aim of this paper is to determine whether forward-looking option-implied returns forecasts lead to better out-of-sample portfolio performance than conventional time series models. We consider a simple two-asset setting with a risk-free asset and the S&P 500 index the risky asset with monthly...

It contains an introduction to how simulation methods can be used to price American options and a discussion of various existing methods. An application using one of these methods, the regression based method, to the GARCH option pricing model is also provided

This paper presents the first comparison of the accuracy of density forecasts for stock prices. Six sets of forecasts are evaluated for DJIA stocks, across four forecast horizons. Two forecasts are risk-neutral densities implied by the Black-Scholes and Heston models. The third set are...

In this paper we propose the optimum weighting scheme for pricing American options under a local volatility model. American options are priced under the constant elasticity of variance volatility model using Monte Carlo simulation. The residuals obtained from regression were heteroscedastic. For...

We present a computationally tractable method for simulating arbitrage free implied volatility surfaces. We illustrate how our method may be combined with a factor model for the implied volatility surface to generate dynamic scenarios for arbitrage-free implied volatility surfaces. Our approach...

In usual pricing approaches for weather derivatives, forward-looking information such as meteorological weather forecasts is not considered. Thus, important knowledge used by market participants is ignored in theory. By extending a standard model for the daily temperature, this paper allows the...

This chapter surveys the methods available for extracting information from option prices that can be used in forecasting. We consider option-implied volatilities, skewness, kurtosis, and densities. More generally, we discuss how any forecasting object which is a twice differentiable function of...

We investigate whether there are predictable patterns in the dynamics of higher order risk-neutral moments extracted from the market prices of S&P 500 index options. To this end, we conduct a horse race among alternative forecasting models within an out-of-sample context over various forecasting...

Volatility implied from observed option contracts systematically varies with the contracts' strike price and time to expiration, giving rise to an instantaneously non-flat implied volatility surface (IVS) that exhibits substantial time variation. We identify a number of latent factors that drive...