Local Volatility Model

Volatility Calibration via Automatic Local Regression ArXiv ID: 2509.16334 “View on arXiv” Authors: Ruozhong Yang, Hao Qin, Charlie Che, Liming Feng Abstract Managing exotic derivatives requires accurate mark-to-market pricing and stable Greeks for reliable hedging. The Local Volatility (LV) model distinguishes itself from other pricing models by its ability to match observable market prices across all strikes and maturities with high accuracy. However, LV calibration is fundamentally ill-posed: finite market observables must determine a continuously-defined surface with infinite local volatility parameters. This ill-posed nature often causes spiky LV surfaces that are particularly problematic for finite-difference-based valuation, and induces high-frequency oscillations in solutions, thus leading to unstable Greeks. To address this challenge, we propose a pre-calibration smoothing method that can be integrated seamlessly into any LV calibration workflow. Our method pre-processes market observables using local regression that automatically minimizes asymptotic conditional mean squared error to generate denoised inputs for subsequent LV calibration. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed pre-calibration smoothing yields significantly smoother LV surfaces and greatly improves Greek stability for exotic options with negligible additional computational cost, while preserving the LV model’s ability to fit market observables with high fidelity. ...

Path weighting sensitivities ArXiv ID: 2411.13403 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract In this paper, we study the computation of sensitivities with respect to spot of path dependent financial derivatives by means of path weighting. We propose explicit path weighting formula and variance reduction adjustment in order to address the large variance happening when the first simulation time step is small. We also propose a covariance inflation technique to addresses the degenerator case when the covariance matrix is singular. The stock dynamics we consider is given in a general functional form, which includes the classical Black-Scholes model, the implied distribution model, and the local volatility model. ...

Basket Options with Volatility Skew: Calibrating a Local Volatility Model by Sample Rearrangement ArXiv ID: 2407.02901 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract The pricing of derivatives tied to baskets of assets demands a sophisticated framework that aligns with the available market information to capture the intricate non-linear dependency structure among the assets. We describe the dynamics of the multivariate process of constituents with a copula model and propose an efficient method to extract the dependency structure from the market. The proposed method generates coherent sets of samples of the constituents process through systematic sampling rearrangement. These samples are then utilized to calibrate a local volatility model (LVM) of the basket process, which is used to price basket derivatives. We show that the method is capable of efficiently pricing basket options based on a large number of basket constituents, accomplishing the calibration process within a matter of seconds, and achieving near-perfect calibration to the index options of the market. ...

Joint Calibration of Local Volatility Models with Stochastic Interest Rates using Semimartingale Optimal Transport ArXiv ID: 2308.14473 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract We develop and implement a non-parametric method for joint exact calibration of a local volatility model and a correlated stochastic short rate model using semimartingale optimal transport. The method relies on the duality results established in Joseph, Loeper, and Obloj, 2023 and jointly calibrates the whole equity-rate dynamics. It uses an iterative approach which starts with a parametric model and tries to stay close to it, until a perfect calibration is obtained. We demonstrate the performance of our approach on market data using European SPX options and European cap interest rate options. Finally, we compare the joint calibration approach with the sequential calibration, in which the short rate model is calibrated first and frozen. ...