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Encyclopedia > Stochastic volatility

Stochastic volatility models are used in the field of quantitative finance to evaluate derivative securities, such as options. The name derives from the models' treatment of the underlying security's volatility as a random process, governed by state variables such as the price level of the underlier, the tendency of volatility to revert to some long-run mean value, and the variance of the volatility process itself, among others. Volatility most frequently refers to the standard deviation of the change in value of a financial instrument with a specific time horizon. ... Financial mathematics is the branch of applied mathematics concerned with the financial markets. ... Derivatives traders at the Chicago Board of Trade. ... Securities are tradeable interests representing financial value. ... In finance options are types of derivative contracts, including call options and put options, where the future payoffs to the buyer and seller of the contract are determined by the price of another security, such as a common stock. ... In the mathematics of probability, a stochastic process can be thought of as a random function. ... A state variable is any variable which represents the state of an object. ... In probability theory and statistics, the variance of a random variable (or somewhat more precisely, of a probability distribution) is a measure of its statistical dispersion, indicating how its possible values are spread around the expected value. ...


Stochastic volatility models address many of the short-comings of popular option pricing models such as the Black-Scholes model and the Cox-Ross-Rubinstein model. In particular, these models assume that the underlier volatility is constant over the life of the derivative, and unaffected by the changes in the price level of the underlier. However, these models cannot explain long-observed anomalies such as volatility smile, which indicate that volatility does tend to vary over time. By assuming that the volatility of the underlying price is a stochastic process rather than a constant, it becomes possible to more accurately model derivatives. The Black-Scholes model, often simply called Black-Scholes, is a model of the varying price over time of financial instruments, and in particular stocks. ... In finance, the binomial options pricing model provides a generalisable numerical method for the valuation of options. ... Volatility Smile refers to the long-observed pattern in which at-the-money options tend to have lower implied volatilities than other options. ...

Contents

Basic Model

Starting from a constant volatiltiy approach, assume that the derivative's underlier price follows a standard model for brownian motion: Three different views of Brownian motion, with 32 steps, 256 steps, and 2048 steps denoted by progressively lighter colors. ...

where is the constant drift (i.e. expected return) of the security price , is the constant volatility, and is a standard gaussian with zero mean and unit standard deviation. This is the starting point for non-stochastic volatility models such as Black-Scholes and Cox-Ross-Rubinstein. Probability density function of Gaussian distribution (bell curve). ... In statistics, mean has two related meanings: Look up mean in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... In probability and statistics, the standard deviation of a probability distribution, random variable, or population or multiset of values is a measure of the spread of its values. ...


For a stochastic volatility model, replace the constant volatility with a function , that models the variance of . This variance function is also modeled as brownian motion, and the form of depends on the particular SV model under study.

where and are some functions of and is another standard gaussian that may or may not be correlated with .


Heston Model

See Heston model for the complete article

The popular Heston model is a commonly used SV model, in which the randomness of the variance process varies as the square root of variance. In this case, the differential equation for variance takes the form: The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ...

where is the mean long-term volatility, is the rate at which the volatility reverts toward its long-term mean, is the volatility of the volatility process, and is, like , a gaussian with zero mean and unit standard deviation. However, and are correlated with the constant correlation value . Positive linear correlations between 1000 pairs of numbers. ...


In other words, the Heston SV model assumes that volatility is a random process that

  1. exhibits a tendency to revert towards a long-term mean volatility at a rate ,
  2. exhibits its own (constant) volatility, ,
  3. and whose source of randomness is correlated (with correlation ) with the randomness of the underlier's price processes.

GARCH Model

The Generalized Auto-Regression Conditional Heteroskedacity (GARCH) model is another popular model for estimating stochastic volatility. It assumes that the randomness of the variance process varies with the variance, as opposed to the square root of the variance as in the Heston model. The standard GARCH(1,1) model has the following form for the variance differential: In econometrics, an autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) model considers the variance of the current error term to be a function of the variances of the previous time periods error terms. ...

The GARCH model has been extended via numerous variants, including the NGARCH, LGARCH, EGARCH, GJR-GARCH, etc.


3/2 Model

The 3/2 model is similar to the Heston model, but assumes that the randomness of the variance process varies with . The form of the variance differential is:

Calibration

Once a particular SV model is chosen, it must be calibrated against existing market data. Calibration is the process of identifying the set of model parameters that are most likely given the observed data. This process is called Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE). For instance, in the Heston model, the set of model parameters can be estimated applying an MLE algorithm such as the Powell Directed Set method [1] to observations of historic underlying security prices. Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a popular statistical method used to make inferences about parameters of the underlying probability distribution from a given data set. ... In mathematics, a directed set is a set A together with a binary relation ≤ having the following properties: a ≤ a for all a in A (reflexivity) if a ≤ b and b ≤ c, then a ≤ c (transitivity) for any two a and b in A, there...


In this case, you start with an estimate for , compute the residual errors when applying the historic price data to the resulting model, and then adjust to try to minimize these errors. Once the calibration has been performed, it is standard practice to re-calibrate the model over time.


See also

Local volatility is a term used in quantitative finance to denote the set of diffusion coefficients, , that are consistent with the set of market prices for all option prices on a given underlier. ...

References

  • Stochastic Volatility and Mean-variance Analysis, Hyungsok Ahn, Paul Wilmott, (2006).
  • A closed-form solution for options with stochastic volatility, SL Heston, (1993).
  • Inside Volatility Arbitrage, Alireza Javaheri, (2005).
  • Accelerating the Calibration of Stochastic Volatility Models, Kilin, Fiodar (2006).


  Financial derivatives  
Options
Vanilla Types: Option styles | Call | Put | Warrants | Fixed income | Employee stock option | FX
Strategies: Covered calls | Naked puts | Bear Call Spread | Bear Put Spread | Bull Call Spread | Bull Put Spread | Calendar spread | Straddle | Long Straddle | Long Strangle | Butterfly | Short Butterfly Spread | Short Straddle | Short Strangle | Vertical spread | Volatility arbitrage | Debit Spread | Credit spread | Synthetic
Exotics: Asian | Lookbacks | Barrier | Binary | Swaptions | Mountain range
Valuation: Moneyness | Option time value | Black-Scholes | Black | Binomial | Stochastic volatility | Implied volatility | Net volatility
See Also: CBOE | Derivatives market | Option Screeners | Option strategies | Pin risk
Swaps
Interest rate | Total return | Equity | Credit default | Forex | Cross-currency | Constant maturity | Basis | Variance


 

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