Spectrally accurate option pricing under the time fractional Black-Scholes model

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21914/anziamj.v63.15412

Keywords:

spectral element discretization, option pricing, time-fractional Black-Scholes equation

Abstract

We propose a Legendre–Laguerre spectral approximation to price the European and double barrier options in the time-fractional framework. By choosing an appropriate basis function, the spectral discretization is used for the approximation of the spatial derivatives of the time-fractional Black–Scholes equation. For the time discretization, we consider the popular \(L1\) finite difference approximation, which converges with order \(\mathcal{O}((\Delta \tau)^{2-\alpha})\) for functions which are twice continuously differentiable. However, when using the \(L1\) scheme for problems with nonsmooth initial data, only the first-order accuracy in time is achieved. This low-order accuracy is also observed when solving the time-fractional Black–Scholes European and barrier option pricing problems for which the payoffs are all nonsmooth. To increase the temporal convergence rate, we therefore consider a Richardson extrapolation method, which when combined with the spectral approximation in space, exhibits higher order convergence such that high accuracies over the whole discretization grid are obtained. Compared with the traditional finite difference scheme, numerical examples clearly indicate that the spectral approximation converges exponentially over a small number of grid points. Also, as demonstrated, such high accuracies can be achieved in much fewer time steps using the extrapolation approach.

 

doi:10.1017/S1446181121000286

 

Author Biographies

Geraldine Tour, University of Mauritius

Department of Mathematics, University of Mauritius, Reduit, Mauritius.

Nawdha Thakoor, University of Mauritius

Department of Mathematics, University of Mauritius, Reduit, Mauritius.

Désiré Yannick Tangman, University of Mauritius

Head, Department of Mathematics, University of Mauritius, Reduit, Mauritius.

Published

2021-10-02

Issue

Section

Special Issue for Financial Mathematics, Probability and Statistics