Pricing American Options by a Fourier Transform Multinomial Tree in a Conic Market

Abstract

Based on FFT, a high‐order multinomial tree is constructed, and the method to obtain the price of American style options in the Lévy conic market is studied. Firstly, the nature of the Lévy process and the pricing principle of European‐style options are introduced. Secondly, the method to construct a high‐order multinomial tree based on Fourier transform is presented. It can be proved by theoretical derivation that the multinomial tree can converge to the Lévy process. Thirdly, we introduce the conic market theory based on the concave distortion function and give the discretization method of the concave distortion expectation. Then, the American option pricing method based on reverse iteration is given. Finally, the CGMY process is used to demonstrate how to price the American put option in the Lévy conic market. We can draw conclusions that the Fourier transform multinomial tree can avoid the difficulty of parameter estimation when using traditional moment matching methods to construct multinomial trees. Because the Lévy process has the analytic form characteristic function, this method is a promising method to calculate the prices of options in the Lévy conic market.