Chapter 20 Fitting and Testing
Sixteen chapters have built models and taken their parameters as given. This one asks where the numbers come from and how anyone would know a model is wrong. The two questions turn out to be different problems: fitting to today’s prices is an inverse problem with no statistics in it, while fitting to a history is a statistical problem with a bias large enough to reverse a trading decision. Both have the same failure, which is a fit that looks excellent while determining almost nothing, and both have the same remedy, which is to measure how far the answer can move before anyone would notice. We finish with the one general test of whether a model fits at all; chapter 21 continues into the harder case where the parameter itself is never observed.
20.1 Choosing the Model in the First Place
Before a parameter can be fitted, something has to be chosen to fit, and these notes have now built enough models that the choice is real. This section is the one a reader is entitled to ask for and most texts omit: given a trade, which model, and why.
There is a single question underneath it, and it is the one chapter 15 ended on.
Remark (The question that decides it).
What is this payoff a bet on, and does the candidate model have a view on that quantity or has it assumed one?
Every entry in the table below is an application of that question. A model is adequate when the things the payoff depends on are things the model was calibrated to; it is dangerous exactly when the payoff is sensitive to something the model fixed by assumption — which is chapter 18’s Gaussian copula, chapter 9’s local volatility, and chapter 10’s sticky strike, all over again.
Does it need a model at all?
The first question is whether to reach for one, and surprisingly often the answer is no.
If the payoff is a function of one rate or price observed on one date, its distribution on that date is the whole of the relevant information, and the option market quotes that distribution. Static replication then prices it exactly, as chapter 15 did for constant maturity swaps and cash settled swaptions, and chapter 9’s Breeden-Litzenberger did for anything written on a single equity fixing. No model is better than a model here, because a model can only add an assumption to information that was already complete.
A model becomes necessary when the payoff depends on more than one date, on the path, on more than one underlying, or on when the holder chooses to act. Those four are the whole of it.
Which model, and what each one is really for
| Model | Reach for it when | It assumes away |
| Black-Scholes / Black-76 | Quoting and hedging a vanilla | Everything about the smile |
| Local volatility (ch. 9) | The payoff depends only on | Volatility dynamics: the smile |
| terminal distributions | is predicted to slide, wrongly | |
| SABR (ch. 10) | Interpolating one expiry’s smile | Any consistency between expiries |
| SVI | Interpolating one expiry’s smile | Dynamics entirely — it is a |
| so that it can be differentiated | curve, not a process | |
| Heston (ch. 10) | A consistent surface across | Fit to any single expiry’s wings |
| expiries; forward volatility | ||
| LSV (ch. 11) | Barriers and cliquets: exact | Nothing much, at the cost of |
| vanilla fit and live dynamics | being slow and fiddly to build | |
| Hull-White (ch. 8) | Bermudans and callables where | The smile entirely, and any |
| the smile is second order | decorrelation along the curve | |
| Quasi-Gaussian / Cheyette | Callables that are also | Realism in exchange for a |
| (ch. 12) | smile sensitive | finite Markov state |
| Market models | Products written on the actual | Tractability: it is a simulation, |
| (ch. 13) | quoted rates; flexible | so callables need regression |
| correlation | ||
| Markov functional | Callables needing an exact | Any control over the dynamics |
| vanilla fit and speed | beyond the one factor |
Remark (The row that is not a model).
One entry in that table is a different kind of thing and the difference is the point of including it. Every other row is a process: it says what the underlying does, and a price follows. SVI — the stochastic volatility inspired parameterisation, which contains no stochastic volatility — says only what one expiry’s smile looks like. It writes the total implied variance at log-moneyness as
| (20.1) |
and stops. There is no underlying and no dynamics, so it cannot price a barrier and has nothing to say about tomorrow’s smile.
The five parameters are readable. Vertical shift is the level, horizontal shift is where the vertex sits, is how rounded the vertex is, sets the size of the wings, and tilts them: the wing slopes are to the left and to the right,111svi::Svi::wing_slopes, checked against the curve far out in each wing. so a negative is the equity skew.
Structure (Why a hyperbola).
Expression (20.1) looks like an arbitrary functional form and is less arbitrary than it looks. It is a hyperbola, written in coordinates that name its degrees of freedom, and the constraints on a smile point at that shape without quite forcing it.
A smile must do three things. It must be smooth and convex in the middle, since chapter 9 makes the second derivative in strike a probability density. It must grow at most linearly in each wing, which is Lee’s moment formula: total variance rising faster than would price deep options as though the underlying had moments it cannot have. And the two wings are free to grow at different rates, because skew exists.
Those constraints narrow the field sharply. They rule out anything with quadratic wings, anything obliged to be symmetric, anything not convex. What they do not do is determine a single curve: adding to any admissible smile a smooth convex bump that dies away at both ends leaves the asymptotes and the convexity exactly as they were, so there are infinitely many curves meeting all three conditions, and (20.1) is not the general solution of them.
What can be said is smaller and still stands. Among conics, the condition is decisive: an ellipse has no real asymptote and a parabola has one, so a conic with two distinct real asymptotes is a hyperbola and can be nothing else. So (20.1) is the lowest-degree algebraic curve that does what a smile has to do, and its five parameters are exactly the count those conditions suggest — two asymptotic slopes, two shifts, one radius of curvature at the vertex. That the count matches is an observation rather than a derivation, and the form remains a choice: it is the minimal one, made once and kept because it fits, not a consequence with a proof behind it.
Which also says exactly where it can go wrong. The whole of Lee’s condition is that neither asymptote is steeper than two, or , and it is a constraint on the fit rather than a property of the form. Violating it produces a smile whose implied density goes negative, and the density is what Dupire divides by — a fit outside the bound does not degrade the local volatility surface, it changes the sign of its denominator.222measured, with the density obtained by differencing prices rather than from the parameters.
Remark (The three families, and what actually separates them).
The table is long and the underlying taxonomy is short. Interest rate models differ in what they take as the state variable, and that choice, not the label, determines what each is good for.
Short rate models — Hull-White, and the quasi-Gaussian models of chapter 12 — carry a small Markov state. That makes them solvable on a lattice or a partial differential equation grid, which makes early exercise cheap, which is why callables are priced with them. The price of the small state is that the whole curve moves as a function of one or two numbers, so decorrelation between distant parts of the curve is not available.
Market models take the traded forward rates themselves as state variables. That is the honest choice — they model what is quoted, with as much correlation structure as one cares to specify — and it costs tractability, since the state is high-dimensional and simulation is the only route. Early exercise then needs a regression method, and every regression method is an approximation nobody can bound.
Markov functional models take neither, and instead impose that the state is one dimensional and choose the functional form to reproduce vanilla prices exactly. They are fast and they fit, and what one gives up is any independent control of the dynamics: having spent the freedom on the fit, there is none left for how the curve moves.
Choosing between them is choosing which of exact fit, rich dynamics, and cheap early exercise to give up, because no model in use gives all three.
Example 20.1 (Four trades, four answers).
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A CMS cap. One rate, one date per caplet. No model — replicate over the swaption smile, chapter 15. Reaching for Hull-White here obtains a worse answer more slowly, because the model’s own smile replaces the market’s.
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A Bermudan swaption. Several exercise dates, so the joint distribution matters and no set of European quotes supplies it. A short rate model, because early exercise is the binding constraint and a lattice is what makes it cheap.
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An equity barrier. The payoff depends on the path, and on the smile at every level the barrier might be crossed at. Local-stochastic volatility, chapter 11, because a pure local volatility model prices the barrier off dynamics it got wrong and a pure stochastic volatility model does not fit the vanillas it will be hedged with.
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A callable range accrual. Path dependent, smile sensitive and callable at once, which is the intersection that has no comfortable answer. Quasi-Gaussian if the callability dominates, a market model with regression if the smile does, and in either case a reserve against the difference between the two prices — which is the honest measure of the model risk, and larger than most desks admit.
Remark (The rule that survives when the table does not).
Models come and go and the table above will date. What does not is the discipline: price the trade in two models that disagree about the thing the payoff is most sensitive to, and reserve the difference. If the two agree, the choice did not matter and the reserve is zero. If they disagree, the gap is the part of the price that was never determined by the market — and it is better held as a number on the balance sheet than discovered later.
The rest of this chapter is about what to do once a model is chosen. This section was about not choosing one for a trade that never needed it.
20.2 Two Jobs With One Name
A desk says “calibration” for both of the following, and they have almost nothing in common.
Definition 20.1 (Calibration).
Choosing parameters so that a model reproduces today’s quoted prices. Cross-sectional, done under , repeated every morning.
Definition 20.2 (Estimation).
Choosing parameters so that a model matches the behaviour of a historical time series. Longitudinal, done under , and a question of statistical inference.
Chapter 6 drew the measure distinction and this is where it bites hardest. Calibration has no sampling error — there is no sample. The quotes are what they are, and if the model reproduces them there is nothing left to be uncertain about in the statistical sense. Its difficulty is entirely that the map from parameters to prices may not be invertible.
Estimation has the opposite profile. The model may be inverted perfectly well; the trouble is that a finite history is a finite sample, and the estimator built on it can be badly biased in a direction nobody checks.
Remark (Why the confusion is expensive).
A parameter fitted one way is routinely used as though it had been fitted the other. Correlation is the standard offender: a correlation estimated from history is a quantity, a correlation calibrated to quanto or spread option prices is a quantity, and they differ by a risk premium exactly as chapter 17’s forward differed from the expected spot. Substituting one for the other is not an approximation. It is a category error that happens to produce a number.
20.3 A Perfect Fit That Determines Nothing
Take the SABR model of chapter 10 and the cleanest possible test of whether calibration recovers parameters: generate the quotes from a known SABR model, so the model is exactly right and there is no noise, no bid-offer and no misspecification. If the parameters cannot be recovered here, they cannot be recovered anywhere.
A five year expiry, a forward at , seven strikes spanning two percent either side, and with fixed at . Starting the optimiser deliberately far away, at , it converges and reproduces every quote to within volatility points. A perfect fit.
Now ask the only question that matters: how far can each parameter be moved, re-optimising the others, before the fit degrades by a tenth of a volatility point — an amount several times smaller than any real bid-offer?333 against , and the width of .
| Parameter | Fitted | Range that still fits | Width |
|---|---|---|---|
The level parameter is pinned to about one percent of itself. The correlation is not pinned at all: it can be anything from to , and every one of those values reproduces the whole smile to inside a tenth of a point. The volatility of volatility can be anywhere in a nine-fold range.