In Foreign Exchange Markets vanilla and barrier options are traded frequently. The market standard is a cutoff time of 10:00 a.m. in New York for the strike of vanillas and a knock-out event based on a continuously observed barrier in the inter bank market. However, many clients, particularly...

We derive a semi-analytical formula for pricing forward-start options in the Barndorff-Nielsen- Shephard model. In terms of computational time, this formula is equivalent to one-dimensional integration.

When pricing the convexity effect in irregular interest rate derivatives such as, e.g., Libor-in-arrears or CMS, one often ignores the volatility smile, which is quite pronounced in the interest rate options market. This note solves the problem of convexity by replicating the irregular interest...

No front-office software can survive without providing derivatives of option prices with respect to underlying market or model parameters, the so called Greeks. If a closed form solution for an option exists, Greeks can be computed analytically and they are numerically stable. However, for...

The foreign exchange options market is one of the largest and most liquid OTC derivative markets in the world. Surprisingly, very little is known in the academic literature about the construction of the most important object in this market: The implied volatility smile. The smile construction...

This paper compares the performance of three methods for pricing vanilla options in models with known characteristic function: (1) Direct integration, (2) Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), (3) Fractional FFT. The most important application of this comparison is the choice of the fastest method for...

The vanna-volga method, also called the traders' rule of thumb is an empirical procedure that can be used to infer an implied-volatility smile from three available quotes for a given maturity. It is based on the construction of locally replicating portfolios whose associated hedging costs are...

A quanto option can be any cash-settled option, whose payoff is converted into a third currency at maturity at a pre-specified rate, called the quanto factor. There can be quanto plain vanilla, quanto barriers, quanto forward starts, quanto corridors, etc. The valuation theory is covered for...

Starting from the Merton framework for firm defaults, we provide the analytics and robustness of the relationship between default correlations. We show that loans with higher default probabilities will not only have higher variances but also higher correlations between loans. As a consequence,...