Path shadowing Monte Carlo

Abstract

We introduce a Path Shadowing Monte Carlo method, which provides the prediction of future paths, given any generative model. At any given date, it averages future quantities over generated price paths whose past history matches, or ‘shadows’, the actual (observed) history. We test our approach using paths generated from a maximum entropy model of financial prices, based on a recently proposed multi-scale analogue of the standard skewness and kurtosis called ‘Scattering Spectra’. This model promotes the diversity of generated paths while reproducing main statistical properties of financial prices, including stylized facts such as volatility roughness. Our method yields state-of-the-art predictions for future realized volatility and allows one to determine conditional option smiles for the S&P500 that outperform both the most recent low-parametric models and the option market itself. The code is available at https://github.com/RudyMorel/shadowing (This work is supported by the PRAIRIE 3IA Institute of the French ANR-19-P3IA-0001 program and the ENS-CFM models and data science chair.).