IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rdg/icmadp/icma-dp2009-06.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Analytic Approximations for Spread Options

Author

Listed:
  • Carol Alexander

    (ICMA Centre, University of Reading)

  • Aanand Venkatramanan

    (ICMA Centre, University of Reading)

Abstract

This paper expresses the price of a spread option as the sum of the prices of two compound options. One compound option is to exchange vanilla call options on the two underlying assets and the other is to exchange the corresponding put options. This way we derive a new analytic approximation for the price of a European spread option, and a corresponding approximation for each of its price, volatilty and correlation hedge ratios. Our approach has many advantages over existing analytic approximations, which have limited validity and an indeterminacy that renders them of little practical use. The compound exchange option approximation for European spread options is then extended to American spread options on assets that pay dividends or incur carry costs. Simulations quantify the accuracy of our approach; we also present an empirical application, to the American crack spread options that are traded on NYMEX. For illustration, we compare our results with those obtained using the approximation attributed to Kirk (1996) which is commonly used by traders.

Suggested Citation

  • Carol Alexander & Aanand Venkatramanan, 2007. "Analytic Approximations for Spread Options," ICMA Centre Discussion Papers in Finance icma-dp2009-06, Henley Business School, University of Reading, revised Jun 2009.
  • Handle: RePEc:rdg:icmadp:icma-dp2009-06
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.icmacentre.ac.uk/files/analytic_spread_options.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Li, Minqiang, 2008. "Closed-Form Approximations for Spread Option Prices and Greeks," MPRA Paper 6994, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Emmanuel Hanert & Aanand Venkatramanan, 2008. "Meshfree Approximation for Multi-Asset Options," ICMA Centre Discussion Papers in Finance icma-dp2009-07, Henley Business School, University of Reading, revised Jun 2009.
    2. Andrea Klimešová & Tomáš Václavík, 2016. "Gas Swing Options: Introduction and Pricing using Monte Carlo Methods," Acta Oeconomica Pragensia, Prague University of Economics and Business, vol. 2016(1), pages 15-32.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Minqiang Li & Jieyun Zhou & Shi-Jie Deng, 2010. "Multi-asset spread option pricing and hedging," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 10(3), pages 305-324.
    2. Juan Arismendi, 2014. "A Multi-Asset Option Approximation for General Stochastic Processes," ICMA Centre Discussion Papers in Finance icma-dp2014-03, Henley Business School, University of Reading.
    3. Minqiang Li, 2015. "Derivatives Pricing on Integrated Diffusion Processes: A General Perturbation Approach," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 35(6), pages 582-595, June.
    4. Pellegrino, Tommaso & Sabino, Piergiacomo, 2014. "On the use of the moment-matching technique for pricing and hedging multi-asset spread options," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 172-185.
    5. Ziming Dong & Dan Tang & Xingchun Wang, 2023. "Pricing vulnerable basket spread options with liquidity risk," Review of Derivatives Research, Springer, vol. 26(1), pages 23-50, April.
    6. Leccadito, Arturo & Paletta, Tommaso & Tunaru, Radu, 2016. "Pricing and hedging basket options with exact moment matching," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(C), pages 59-69.
    7. Arismendi, Juan & Genaro, Alan De, 2016. "A Monte Carlo multi-asset option pricing approximation for general stochastic processes," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 88(C), pages 75-99.
    8. Jaehyuk Choi, 2018. "Sum of all Black–Scholes–Merton models: An efficient pricing method for spread, basket, and Asian options," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 38(6), pages 627-644, June.
    9. Dongdong Hu & Hasanjan Sayit & Frederi Viens, 2023. "Pricing basket options with the first three moments of the basket: log-normal models and beyond," Papers 2302.08041, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2023.
    10. Ping Wu & Robert J. Elliott, 2017. "Valuation of certain CMS spreads," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer;Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, vol. 31(4), pages 445-467, November.
    11. Jui‐Jane Chang & Son‐Nan Chen & Ting‐Pin Wu, 2013. "Currency‐Protected Swaps and Swaptions with Nonzero Spreads in a Multicurrency LMM," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 33(9), pages 827-867, September.
    12. Edward P. C. Kao & Weiwei Xie, 2017. "Pricing spread options by generalized bivariate edgeworth expansion," International Journal of Financial Engineering (IJFE), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 4(02n03), pages 1-30, June.
    13. Li, Minqiang & Mercurio, Fabio, 2013. "Closed-Form Approximation of Timer Option Prices under General Stochastic Volatility Models," MPRA Paper 47465, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    14. Nicola Cufaro Petroni & Piergiacomo Sabino, 2015. "Cointegrating Jumps: an Application to Energy Facilities," Papers 1509.01144, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2016.
    15. Matteo Gardini & Piergiacomo Sabino, 2022. "Exchange option pricing under variance gamma-like models," Papers 2207.00453, arXiv.org.
    16. Nicola Secomandi & Mulan X. Wang, 2012. "A Computational Approach to the Real Option Management of Network Contracts for Natural Gas Pipeline Transport Capacity," Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, INFORMS, vol. 14(3), pages 441-454, July.
    17. Chun-Sing Lau & Chi-Fai Lo, 2014. "The pricing of basket-spread options," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(11), pages 1971-1982, November.
    18. Elisa Alòs & Jorge A. León, 2013. "On the closed-form approximation of short-time random strike options," Economics Working Papers 1347, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
    19. Kwangil Bae, 2019. "Valuation and applications of compound basket options," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 39(6), pages 704-720, June.
    20. Alexander Kushpel, 2015. "Pricing of high-dimensional options," Papers 1510.07221, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Spread options; exchange options; American options; analytic formula; Kirks approximation; correlation skew;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C02 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - General - - - Mathematical Economics
    • C30 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rdg:icmadp:icma-dp2009-06. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Marie Pearson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bsrdguk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.