Calibration of Stochastic Volatility Models: An Optimal Control Approach

Calibration of stochastic volatility models: A Tikhonov regularization approach

This thesis presents our study on using the hybrid stochastic-local volatility model for option pricing. Many researchers have demonstrated that stochastic volatility models cannot capture the whole volatility surface accurately, although the model parameters have been calibrated to replicate the market implied volatility data for near at-the-money strikes. On the other hand, the local volatility model can reproduce the implied volatility surface, whereas it does not consider the stochastic behaviour of the volatility. To combine the advantages of stochastic volatility (SV) and local volatility (LV) models, a class of stochastic-local volatility (SLV) models has been developed. The SLV model contains a stochastic volatility component represented by a volatility process and a local volatility component represented by a so-called leverage function. The leverage function can be roughly seen as a ratio between local volatility and conditional expectation of stochastic volatility. The difficulty of implementing the SLV model lies in the calibration of the leverage function. In the thesis, we first review the fundamental theories of stochastic differential equations and the classic option pricing models, and study the behaviour of the volatility in the context of FX market. We then introduce the SLV model and illustrate our implementation of the calibration and pricing procedure. We apply the SLV model to exotic option pricing in the FX market and compare pricing results of the SLV model with pure local volatility and pure stochastic volatility models. Numerical results show that the SLV model can match the implied volatility surface very well as well as improve the pricing performance for barrier options. In addition, we further discuss some extensions of the SLV project, such as parallelization potential for accelerating option pricing and pricing techniques for window barrier options. Although the SLV model we use in the thesis is not entirely new, we contribute to the research in the following aspects: 1) we investigate the hybrid volatility modeling thoroughly from theoretical backgrounds to practical implementations; 2) we resolve some critical issues in implementing the SLV model such as developing a fast and stable numerical method to derive the leverage function; and 3) we build a robust calibration and pricing platform under the SLV model, which can be extended for practical uses.

This thesis presents our study on using the hybrid stochastic-local volatility model for option pricing. Many researchers have demonstrated that stochastic volatility models cannot capture the whole volatility surface accurately, although the model parameters have been calibrated to replicate the market implied volatility data for near at-the-money strikes. On the other hand, the local volatility model can reproduce the implied volatility surface, whereas it does not consider the stochastic behaviour of the volatility. To combine the advantages of stochastic volatility (SV) and local volatility (LV) models, a class of stochastic-local volatility (SLV) models has been developed. The SLV model contains a stochastic volatility component represented by a volatility process and a local volatility component represented by a so-called leverage function. The leverage function can be roughly seen as a ratio between local volatility and conditional expectation of stochastic volatility. The difficulty of implementing the SLV model lies in the calibration of the leverage function. In the thesis, we first review the fundamental theories of stochastic differential equations and the classic option pricing models, and study the behaviour of the volatility in the context of FX market. We then introduce the SLV model and illustrate our implementation of the calibration and pricing procedure. We apply the SLV model to exotic option pricing in the FX market and compare pricing results of the SLV model with pure local volatility and pure stochastic volatility models. Numerical results show that the SLV model can match the implied volatility surface very well as well as improve the pricing performance for barrier options. In addition, we further discuss some extensions of the SLV project, such as parallelization potential for accelerating option pricing and pricing techniques for window barrier options. Although the SLV model we use in the thesis is not entirely new, we contribute to the research in the following aspects: 1) we investigate the hybrid volatility modeling thoroughly from theoretical backgrounds to practical implementations; 2) we resolve some critical issues in implementing the SLV model such as developing a fast and stable numerical method to derive the leverage function; and 3) we build a robust calibration and pricing platform under the SLV model, which can be extended for practical uses.

Term Structure and Volatility: Lessons from the Eurodollar Markets

Stochastic volatility (SV) models take a very important role in financial market, while there still exist some difficulties in estimating parameters in SV models. In this paper, a unified parameter estimation algorithm is proposed to estimate continuous-time SV model. Parameters in equity prices and volatilities stochastic processes are estimated separately after orthogonalization of Brownian motion in SV models. A closed-form of Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) and moment estimation results for four parameters in SV models are deducted. Five typical SV models are simulated to reveal the characteristics in empirical volatilities data. Parameter estimation results are presented to prove the convergence of estimation algorithm. We also compare our algorithm with Least Square (LS) estimations and numerical solutions of all the parameters in with MLE method, respectively. LS can only work in a specific form of SV models and the convergence speed is limited. Numerical solutions of the likelihood function with four parameters are unstable and can not converge to true values of all the parameters. Thus our algorithm works more efficiently than other methods.

In this paper, we propose a fractional stochastic volatility jump-diffusion model which extends the Bates(1996) model. Where we model the volatility as a fractional process. Extensive empirical studies show that the distributions of the logarithmic returns of financial asset usually exhibit properties of self-similarity and long-range dependence and since the fractional Brownian motion has these two important properties, it has the ability to capture the behavior of underlying asset price. Further incorporating jumps into the stochastic volatility framework gives further freedom to financial mathematicians to fit both the short and long end of the implied volatility surface. We propose a stochastic model which contains both fractional and jump process. Then we price options using Monte Carlo simulations along with a variance reduction technique(antithetic variates). We use market data from the S&P 500 index and we compare our results with the Heston and Bates model using error measures. The results show our model greatly outperforms previous models in terms of estimation accuracy.

In this paper we consider the range of prices consistent with no arbitrage for European options in a general stochastic volatility model. We give conditions under which the infimum and the supremum of the possible option prices are equal to the intrinsic value of the option and to the current price of the stock, respectively, and show that these conditions are satisfied in most of the stochastic volatility models from the financial literature. We also discuss properties of Black–Scholes hedging strategies in stochastic volatility models where the volatility is bounded.

In this work we study the effects by including threshold, constant and time-dependent correlation in stochastic volatility (SV) models to capture the asymmetry relationship between stock returns and volatility. We develop SV models which include only time-dependent correlated innovations and both threshold and time-dependent correlation, respectively. It has been shown in literature that the SV model with only constant correlation does a better job of capturing asymmetry than threshold stochastic volatility (TSV) model. We show here that the SV model with time-dependent correlation performs better than the model with constant correlation on capturing asymmetry, and the comprehensive model with both threshold and time-dependently correlated innovations dominates models with pure threshold, constant and time-dependent correlation, and both threshold and constant correlation as well. In our comprehensive model, volatility and returns are time-dependently correlated, where the time-varying correlation is negative, and the volatility is more persistent, less volatile and higher following negative returns as expected. An empirical study is provided to illustrate our findings.

It is widely noted that the Heston stochastic volatility model fails to capture the fat tails often observed in daily equity returns. Adding random jumps improves the model’s ability to capture extreme events. This extension is known as the Bates stochastic volatility jump (SVJ) model. The model parameters for the Heston and Bates SVJ models are generally calibrated to option prices inducing the so-called risk-neutral measure. However, in the absence of a sufficiently liquid options market, one has to resort to calibration under the realworld measure. In this paper, we calibrate the Heston and Bates SVJ models to historical equity returns in the United States and South Africa using the efficient method of moments(EMM). We then show how a real-world stochastic volatility model can be used in practice to test a simple volatility targeting strategy. Our findings suggest that stochastic volatility and jumps are both required to characterise equity returns in South Africa. Furthermore, volatility targeting is an effective strategy that allows investors to manage the downside risk of a portfolio.

We propose a new method to improve density forecasts of the equity premium using information from options markets. We obtain predictive densities from stochastic volatility (SV) and GARCH models, which we then tilt using the second moment of the risk-neutral distribution implied by options prices while imposing a non-negativity constraint on the equity premium. By combining the backward-looking information contained in the GARCH and SV models with the forward-looking information from options prices, our procedure improves the performance of predictive densities. Using density forecasts of the U.S. equity premium from January 1990 to December 2014, we find that tilting leads to more accurate predictions using statistical and economic criteria.

This study performs a comparative analysis of various GARCH and stochastic volatility (SV) models using the BIST 100 index. The models we examine include traditional GARCH (1,1) models and SV models with an AR (1) log-volatility process. Additionally, we consider more flexible models that incorporate jump components, volatility-in-mean, leverage effects, and innovations following a t-distribution or a moving average. The empirical findings reveal the following findings: (1) Stochastic Volatility (SV) models generally demonstrate better performance when compared to their GARCH counterparts. (2) The inclusion of a jump component and innovations following a tdistribution notably enhances the performance of the standard GARCH model while having less impact on the SV model. (3) The presence of a

This paper introduces a general class of stochastic volatility models that can serve as a basis for modeling and estimating simultaneous equation systems involving multivariate volatility processes. The class consists of processes obtained as monotone polynomial transformations of so-called stochastic autoregressive volatility (SARV) models. The class permits a flexible modeling of volatility and avoids strong distributional assumptions. Most of the standard stochastic volatility models are incorporated in the framework, including the lognormal autoregressive model and stochastic volatility generalizations of GARCH and EGARCH. General conditions for strict statinarity, ergodicity, and the existence of finite lower-order unconditional moments for SARV are established. Closed-form expressions for the lowerorder moments constitute the basis for the proposed generalized method of moments estimation procedure. As an illustration we consider an informationdriven model of the return volatility–trading volume system for financial assets. Parameters with structural interpretation are estimated and an extended Kalmanfilter procedure allows for the construction of volatility forecasts based on the bivariate return-volume series. Empirical results are based on daily NYSE data for IBM over 1973–1991.

This paper proposes a new approach to analyze stock return asymmetry and quantiles. We also present a new scale mixture of uniform (SMU) representation for the asymmetric Laplace distribution (ALD). The use of the SMU for a probability distribution is a data augmentation technique that simplifies the Gibbs sampler of the Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. We consider a stochastic volatility (SV) model with an ALD error distribution. With the SMU representation, the full conditional distribution for some parameters is shown to have closed form. It is also known that the ALD can be used to obtain the coefficients of quantile regression models. This paper also considers a quantile SV model by fixing the skew parameter of the ALD at specific quantile level. Simulation study shows that the proposed methodology works well in both SV and quantile SV models using Bayesian approach. In the empirical study, we analyze index returns of the stock markets in Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the UK and study the effect of S&P 500 on these returns. The results show the significant return asymmetry in some markets and the influence by S&P 500 in all markets at all quantile levels. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Modeling Energy Price Dynamics: GARCH Versus Stochastic Volatility

Modeling energy price dynamics: GARCH versus stochastic volatility