Nico Achtsis

Nico Achtsis, Ronald Cools, Dirk Nuyens

We develop a conditional sampling scheme for pricing knock-out barrier options under the Linear Transformations (LT) algorithm from Imai and Tan (2006). We compare our new method to an existing conditional Monte Carlo scheme from Glasserman and Staum (2001), and show that a substantial variance reduction is achieved. We extend the method to allow pricing knock-in barrier options and introduce a root-finding method to obtain a further variance reduction. The effectiveness of the new method is supported by numerical results.

Nico Achtsis, Ronald Cools, Dirk Nuyens

We propose a quasi-Monte Carlo algorithm for pricing knock-out and knock-in barrier options under the Heston (1993) stochastic volatility model. This is done by modifying the LT method from Imai and Tan (2006) for the Heston model such that the first uniform variable does not influence the stochastic volatility path and then conditionally modifying its marginals to fulfill the barrier condition(s). We show this method is unbiased and never does worse than the unconditional algorithm. Additionally the conditioning is combined with a root finding method to also force positive payouts. The effectiveness of this method is shown by extensive numerical results.