Resources

You are all familiar with simple European call options  that are securities promising to pay their holders at some agreed future time T the difference S(T) – K between the price S(T) realized by a monitored underlying S at time T and a fixed amount K , under the condition that S(T) is greater than K . The last long sentence may be compressed t...

A common usage of quanto call options is to benefit from the price appreciation of a foreign asset and on the same time stay immune on exchange rate variations. A European style quanto call option on a foreign asset S with strike K is always cash settled and pays its holder on expiry time T the amount max{S(T) – K, 0} converted into domestic curren...

The pricing of exotic interest rate products cannot ignore the so called market volatility cube that is made daily available by several swaption brokers. Traders often use the SABR Stochastic volatility model in order to estimate vols off the provided grid. In this article I will show you how to price an out-of-the-money swaption by applying SABR c...

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange ( CME ) clears European swaption trades on 3-month USD LIBOR since April 2016 and has thus become the first major exchange that lists Over-The-Counter (OTC) interest rate products with optionality. The standardized swaption contracts have 5 different expiries - 1M, 3M, 6M, 1Y, 2Y – and 7 underlying swap tenors - 1Y, ...

Asian options come in different flavors as described below, but to the extent they have European exercise rights they can be priced by QuantLib using primarily Monte Carlo , but under certain circumstances using also Finite Differences or even analytic formulas. The main feature of an Asian option is that it involves the average of the realized pri...

Most people are unaware of the fact that free and open source QuantLib comes with a great variety of modelling approaches when it comes to pricing an interest rate European swaption in Excel that surpasses what is offered by expensive commercial products. In fact, 14 different modelling approaches are implemented, whereby the Black approach does no...

With this article I want to show you how to create and price American options on an underlying that pays dividends – such as American stock options expiring after the ex-dividend date - in Excel using the open source QuantLib analytics library. In my previous article I showed you how to calculate the fair price of an American option on an unde...

With this article I want to show you how to create and price American options on a non-dividend-paying underlying – such as American stock options - in Excel using the open source QuantLib analytics library. America has been traditionally touted as the "land of choice" and American Options honor their name by granting their holders an additional ch...

With this article I want to show you how to create and price European options on an underlying that pays discrete dividends – such as European stock options - in Excel using the open source QuantLib analytics library. In my previous article I presented an overview of the QuantLib models that can be used in Excel towards pricing the simplest non-lin...

In my previous article I showed you how to create a Stock Option object in Excel and how to access the list of functions that apply to that object. As I pointed out, the most important of these functions is the Price, which calculates the fair price of the calling object. The Price function is a so called Local function, in the sense that it is inv...

In my previous article I listed the main reasons for using Deriscope. Now I will show you how to use Deriscope to create a Stock Option object. Rather than typing the formula by hand, I will ask the wizard to create the formula for me. After I start Excel and press on the Enable and Show Wizard button inside the Deriscope ribbon tab, the Deriscope ...

Options are the simplest non-trivial financial derivatives around. They are part of the curriculum of every university course on Finance for a good reason: They are everywhere!  They are traded on regulated exchanges around the world, change hands over the counter between … consenting adults, enhance or "infect" all sorts of contracts as "embe...