Jérôme Lelong

Christophe De Luigi, Jérôme Lelong, Sylvain Maire

We develop a numerical method for pricing multidimensional vanilla options in the Black-Scholes framework. In low dimensions, we improve an adaptive integration algorithm proposed by two of the authors by introducing a new splitting strategy based on a geometrical criterion. In higher dimensions, this new algorithm is used as a control variate after a dimension reduction based on principal component analysis. Numerical tests are performed on the pricing of basket, put on minimum and digital options in dimensions up to ten.

Areski Cousin, Jérôme Lelong, Tom Picard

Analyzing the effect of business cycle on rating transitions has been a subject of great interest these last fifteen years, particularly due to the increasing pressure coming from regulators for stress testing. In this paper, we consider that the dynamics of rating migrations is governed by an unobserved latent factor. Under a point process filtering framework, we explain how the current state of the hidden factor can be efficiently inferred from observations of rating histories. We then adapt the classical Baum-Welsh algorithm to our setting and show how to estimate the latent factor parameters. Once calibrated, we may reveal and detect economic changes affecting the dynamics of rating migration, in real-time. To this end we adapt a filtering formula which can then be used for predicting future transition probabilities according to economic regimes without using any external covariates. We propose two filtering frameworks: a discrete and a continuous version. We demonstrate and compare the efficiency of both approaches on fictive data and on a corporate credit rating database. The methods could also be applied to retail credit loans.

Jean-Philippe Chancelier, Jérôme Lelong, Bernard Lapeyre

Financial institutions have massive computations to carry out overnight which are very demanding in terms of the consumed CPU. The challenge is to price many different products on a cluster-like architecture. We have used the Premia software to valuate the financial derivatives. In this work, we explain how Premia can be embedded into Nsp, a scientific software like Matlab, to provide a powerful tool to valuate a whole portfolio. Finally, we have integrated an MPI toolbox into Nsp to enable to use Premia to solve a bunch of pricing problems on a cluster. This unified framework can then be used to test different parallel architectures.