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...

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,...

Neural networks (NN) and fuzzy logic systems (FLS) are used successfully for financial forecasting, credit rating and portfolio management. In search for more sophisticated modeling techniques a mixture of NN and FLS has proved to be worth consideration. We propose the novel constructive...

We investigate the association of various firm-specific and market-wide factors with the riskneutral skewness (RNS) implied by the prices of individual stock options. Our analysis covers 149 U.S. firms over a four-year period. Our choice of firms is based on adequate liquidity and trading...

We investigate the robustness of existing methods to calibrate the Cheyette interest rate model to at-the-money swaption, caps and floors. Existing algorithms may fail, because they suffer from numerical instability of derivatives. Therefore, we apply derivative-free techniques and find that...

We develop and empirically test a continuous time equilibrium model for the pricing of oil futures. The model provides a link between no-arbitrage models and expectation oriented models. It highlights the role of sufficient inventories for oil futures pricing and for the explanation of...