Monte-Carlo on Gary Evans website

Monte Carlo double barrier option pricing on GPU using C++ AMP

Mon, 25 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I converted the double barrier option pricing code from my last post to run on the GPU, using C++ AMP, and got an 80% speedup.

This is running on a low powered Acer V5-122p laptop with an AMD A6-1450 processor with an integrated Radeon HD 8250 GPU.

The gist is here: https://gist.github.com/taumuon/bbeeb9e2c1f5082a2699

To be fair, I converted the CPU code to be otherwise identical to the gpu code. Instead of populating an array of the sample path, it instead for each point just determines whether the value breaches the upper or lower barriers and uses the last value for the payoff.

Monte Carlo pricing of Exotic Options in Functional Style C++

Mon, 04 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

My last blog post was about pricing of exotic options using F#. In that post I said “Apart from the Monte Carlo code, the fact that in F# all functions are in the curried form means that composing the payoff functions using partial function application is beautiful. This would be lambda hell to replicate in C#.”

The OO version of this would probably be built via composition: having a class implementing a IPayoff interface (implemented for Call and Put), and that would be used in implementations of IPathPayof, which would be implemented by AsianArithmeticMean, DoubleBarrier etc. The use of OO is to pull out the common implementation, but there’s no state associated with any of these classes - it feels much nicer using function composition.

Monte Carlo pricing of Exotic Options in F#

Fri, 25 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently completed all exercises for the MOOC Monte Carlo methods in Finance, ran by the University of Madrid on Iversity. The course was excellent, both in its content and delivery.

The course started off by refreshing probability theory (cdf, pdf etc) and quickly moved onto generating random numbers, Brownian motion and stochastic differential equations followed by the pricing of options and calculating risk.
The final week’s homework is on the Monte Carlo calculation of a portfolio’s risk, using copulas with Student’s t distribution, but as that week’s homework is still running I’m blogging about the penultimate week’s homework.

MOOCs

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just enrolled on Iversity’s Monte Carlo Methods in Finance course, and have converted some of week 1’s Matlab demo code over to F# and Deedle: https://gist.github.com/taumuon/8602365

I spent the latter half of last year diving into various online courses. I completed Coursera’s Mathematical Methods for Quantitative Finance, and also followed along with a number of other courses to varying levels of completeness.

I completed three weeks assignments of Udacity’s Cuda programming course. Week three was painful due to an error in the reference code, and week 4 was crashing due to a memory exception. I was using a GPU emulator in Ubuntu, and decided that it would be easier with real hardware. I watched the remaining videos and found the parallel algorithms explanations useful.

Monte Carlo C++ AMP

Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This blog is starting to look very inconsistent – my last blog post was talking about starting to write a game, and now I’ve gone onto a totally different topic. Due to time the game’s gone onto, if not the back burner, then a gentle simmer. I’ve got to balance doing cool stuff with keeping on top of various technologies that may be relevant as a contractor, and having a life!