A Closed-Form Pricing Formula for Log-Return Variance Swaps under Stochastic Volatility and Stochastic Interest Rate

Abstract

At present, the study concerning pricing variance swaps under CIR the (Cox–Ingersoll–Ross)–Heston hybrid model has achieved many results; however, due to the instantaneous interest rate and instantaneous volatility in the model following the Feller square root process, only a semi-closed solution can be obtained by solving PDEs. This paper presents a simplified approach to price log-return variance swaps under the CIR–Heston hybrid model. Compared with Cao’s work, an important feature of our approach is that there is no need to solve complex PDEs; a closed-form solution is obtained by applying the martingale theory and Ito^’s lemma. The closed-form solution is significant because it can achieve accurate pricing and no longer takes time to adjust parameters by numerical method. Another significant feature of this paper is that the impact of sampling frequency on pricing formula is analyzed; then the closed-form solution can be extended to an approximate formula. The price curves of the closed-form solution and the approximate solution are presented by numerical simulation. When the sampling frequency is large enough, the two curves almost coincide, which means that our approximate formula is simple and reliable.

Keywords

• CIR–Heston hybrid model
• realized variance
• stochastic volatility
• stochastic interest rate
• variance swap