Journal of Computational Finance

Risk.net

Hybrid finite-difference/pseudospectral methods for the Heston and Heston–Hull–White partial differential equations

Christian Hendricks, Matthias Ehrhardt and Michael Günther

  • We propose a hybrid spatial finite-difference/pseudospectral discretization to price European plain vanilla options under stochastic volatility.
  • The method exhibits seconds order accuracy in direction of the underlying asset, while it shows spectral accuracy in the other coordinate directions.
  • Due to the high rate of convergence the scheme outperforms its finite-difference counterpart in terms of accuracy versus runtime.
  • In combination with Alternating-Direction-Implicit (ADI) time stepping the scheme shows an unconditionally stable behavior.

We propose a hybrid spatial finite-difference/pseudospectral discretization for European option-pricing problems under the Heston and Heston–Hull–White models. In the direction of the underlying asset, where the payoff profile is nonsmooth, we use a standard central second-order finite-difference scheme, whereas we use a Chebyshev collocation method in the other spatial dimensions. In the time domain, we employ alternating direction implicit schemes to efficiently decompose the system matrix into simpler one-dimensional problems. This approach allows us to compute numerical solutions, which are second-order accurate in time and exhibit spectral accuracy in the spatial domains except for the asset direction. The numerical experiments reveal that the proposed scheme outperforms the standard second-order finite-difference scheme in terms of accuracy versus runtime and shows an unconditionally stable behavior.

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