Abstract Financial derivative pricing is a significant challenge in finance, involving the valuation of instruments like options based on underlying assets. While some cases have simple solutions, many require complex classical computational methods like Monte Carlo simulations and numerical techniques. However, as derivative complexities increase, these methods face limitations in computational power. Cases involving Non-Vanilla Basket pricing, American Options, and derivative portfolio risk analysis need extensive computations in higher-dimensional spaces, posing challenges for classical computers. Quantum computing presents a promising avenue by harnessing quantum superposition and entanglement, allowing the handling of high-dimensional spaces effectively. In this paper, we introduce a self-contained and all-encompassing quantum algorithm that operates without reliance on oracles or presumptions. More specifically, we develop an effective stochastic method for simulating exponentially many potential asset paths in quantum parallel, leading to a highly accurate final distribution of stock prices. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this algorithm can be extended to price more complex options and analyze risk within derivative portfolios.
Abstract Financial derivative pricing is a significant challenge in finance, involving the valuation of instruments like options based on underlying assets. While some cases have simple solutions, many require complex classical computational methods like Monte Carlo simulations and numerical techniques. However, as derivative complexities increase, these methods face limitations in computational power. Cases involving Non-Vanilla Basket pricing, American Options, and derivative portfolio risk analysis need extensive computations in higher-dimensional spaces, posing challenges for classical computers. Quantum computing presents a promising avenue by harnessing quantum superposition and entanglement, allowing the handling of high-dimensional spaces effectively. In this paper, we introduce a self-contained and all-encompassing quantum algorithm that operates without reliance on oracles or presumptions. More specifically, we develop an effective stochastic method for simulating exponentially many potential asset paths in quantum parallel, leading to a highly accurate final distribution of stock prices. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this algorithm can be extended to price more complex options and analyze risk within derivative portfolios.
The valuation of American options and the determination of optimal stopping times remain central challenges in option pricing theory and derivatives valuation. Classical approaches to multidimensional problems rely on the dynamic programming principle, which is notoriously difficult to parallelize. Moreover, the need to store continuation values for all simulated paths in each dynamic programming step imposes severe memory constraints on classical computers, limiting the scale of feasible simulations. Quantum computing offers a promising way to address these limitations. In this paper, the authors introduce a novel algorithm for pricing American options on quantum hardware. To date, only one method has been proposed for this purpose. The authors' approach combines the Quantum Binomial Tree with Quantum Machine Learning to enable direct valuation of American options on a quantum computer. By incorporating quantum amplitude estimation, it could achieve a quadratic speed-up over classical Monte Carlo methods. Furthermore, it exploits the exponential growth of the quantum state vector, overcoming the memory bottlenecks that restrict classical approaches.
Options are financial instruments whose payoffs are determined by the value of an underlying asset. These underlying assets are typically stocks, interest rates, or exchange rates, but can also include commodities such as energy or agricultural products. Options serve diverse purposes, including hedging against price volatility and speculating on market movements. Additionally, they play a critical role in assessing certain positions on the balance sheets of insurance companies, particularly in the context of solvency capital requirement calculations. As an option’s payoff lies in the future and is stochastic in nature, finding a fair price today is a non-trivial task. The focus of this work is finding quantum algorithms for calculating these prices and compare them to algorithms designed for classical computers. This work follows two different directions on how to improve on classical methods for option pricing. The first direction is improving on Monte-Carlo (MC) methods and the second one is adapting Fourier based pricing algorithms. The Amplitude Estimation (AE) algorithm promises a quadratic speedup compared to classical MC. This fact makes this algorithm an interesting candidate for improvements by quantum algorithms. It was shown in the literature, that simple options with very crude discretization of the underlying stochastic models, can be implemented on a quantum device and evaluated with AE. One big challenge is the efficient implementation of the option’s payoff profile. To solve this problem colleagues and I have introduced a multi-objective genetic algorithm to automatically find well performing and efficient circuits to implement the payoff of non-path-dependent European options on one or more underlyings. Another strategy for pricing options is based on the fact, that in many models the characteristic function of the underlying is numerically more tractable than its distribution function. There are methods that make use of this fact and the performance of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to efficiently calculate prices for European call options for many strikes in one go. The quantum version of the FFT, the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT), is in some sense, even faster than its classical counterpart. We have adapted the existing classical method to make use of QFT, to benefit from its performance. Finally, the different strategies are benchmarked and compared regarding their accuracy, their potential for scaling and their adaptability to different styles of derivatives and models. The result of this comparison are requirements on the quantum hardware for the methods to be viable as well as use cases where each method has its benefits over the others.
Risk assessment and in particular derivatives pricing is one of the core areas in computational finance and accounts for a sizeable fraction of the global computing resources of the financial industry. We outline a quantum-inspired algorithm for multi-asset options pricing. The algorithm is based on tensor networks, which have allowed for major conceptual and numerical breakthroughs in quantum many body physics and quantum computation. In the proof-of-concept example explored, the tensor network approach yields several orders of magnitude speedup over vanilla Monte Carlo simulations. We take this as good evidence that the use of tensor network methods holds great promise for alleviating the computation burden of risk evaluation in the financial and other industries, thus potentially lowering the carbon footprint these simulations incur today.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the scale and complexity of financial derivatives have increased significantly. Meanwhile, the pricing models of derivatives have become increasingly complex, and have involved larger-scale data, posing unprecedented challenges to algorithms and computing speed. Although classical computing can still solve the pricing problem of some complex derivatives by adopting the big data simulation algorithms, its speed has become more and more difficult to meet the needs of real-time computing. In recent years, the emerging quantum computing makes full use of the advantages of quantum superposition to improve the computing speed and accuracy. It has been proven to be an efficient computing mode in big data simulation. This paper takes the pricing of European options and defaultable bonds as examples to explore the application of Quantum Monte Carlo Simulation of complicated derivative pricing in big data. The innovative comprehensive method of pricing derivatives by Quantum Monte Carlo Simulation provides new development for the application of quantum computing in the pricing of complicated financial derivatives (taking defaultable bond as example) with big data simulation. In the case of defaultable bond pricing, the Quantum Amplitude Estimation has been employed to speed up the Monte Carlo Simulation and the price of it has been successfully obtained with at least the same accuracy, which demonstrates that the Quantum Monte Carlo Simulation is a prospective approach to price the complicated derivatives based on the big data since the quantum bits has dramatically increased.
The accurate valuation of financial derivatives plays a pivotal role in the finance industry. Although closed formulas for pricing are available for certain models and option types, exemplified by the European Call and Put options in the Black-Scholes Model, the use of either more complex models or more sophisticated options precludes the existence of such formulas, thereby requiring alternative approaches. The Monte Carlo simulation, an alternative approach effective in nearly all scenarios, has already been challenged by quantum computing techniques that leverage Amplitude Estimation. Despite its theoretical promise, this approach currently faces limitations due to the constraints of hardware in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. In this study, we introduce and analyze a quantum algorithm for pricing European call options across a broad spectrum of asset models. This method transforms a classical approach, which utilizes the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), into a quantum algorithm, leveraging the efficiency of the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT). Furthermore, we compare this novel algorithm with existing quantum algorithms for option pricing.
The solution of option-pricing problems may turn out to be computationally demanding due to non-linear and path-dependent payoffs, the high dimensionality arising from multiple underlying assets, and sophisticated models of price dynamics. In this context, quantum computing has been proposed as a means to address these challenges efficiently. Prevailing approaches either simulate the stochastic differential equations governing the forward dynamics of underlying asset prices or directly solve the backward pricing partial differential equation. Here, we present an end-to-end quantum algorithmic framework that solves the Kolmogorov forward (Fokker-Planck) partial differential equation for local-volatility models by mapping it to a Hamiltonian-simulation problem via the Schrödingerisation technique. The algorithm specifies how to prepare the initial quantum state, perform Hamiltonian simulation, and how to efficiently recover the option price via a swap test. In particular, the efficiency of the final solution recovery is an important advantage of solving the forward versus the backward partial differential equation. Thus, our end-to-end framework offers a potential route toward quantum advantage for challenging option-pricing tasks. In particular, we obtain a polynomial advantage in grid size for the discretization of a single dimension. Nevertheless, the true power of our methodology lies in pricing high-dimensional systems, such as baskets of options, because the quantum framework admits an exponential speedup with respect to dimension, overcoming the classical curse of dimensionality.