Chapter 9 Implied and Local Volatility
In these notes we take seriously the fact that the market does not price options the way chapter 5 said it should. We show that the option prices at one expiry are the same information as the probability distribution of the underlying at that expiry, that there is always a model with a single deterministic volatility function reproducing every one of those prices, and we derive the formula for it. We finish with Gyongi’s theorem, which explains both why that model exists and why it is not the end of the story.
Where the Curve Went
Chapter 8 put the whole curve in motion and priced a swaption from it, and the last thing it did was reduce that swaption to Black’s formula: one volatility, one strike, in the annuity measure. That reduction is exact, and it is what the next three chapters stand on. A swap rate is a martingale under its own annuity and a forward rate is one under its own forward measure, so once the numeraire is chosen, a caplet or a swaption is an option on one underlying at one date — the same object as an equity option, with the curve already integrated into the numeraire.
So these chapters are not ignoring the term structure. They are working in the measure in which it has already been dealt with.
Structure (Two questions, and why they separate).
There are two distinct things a rates model has to get right.
The first is the marginal question. For one rate, at one date, what is the distribution? This is what a smile is, entirely — the Breeden-Litzenberger theorem below says that the prices at one expiry are that distribution, with nothing left over. It needs no curve, because a numeraire has removed it, and it is the subject of this chapter, chapter 10 and chapter 11.
The second is the joint question. How do several rates, at several dates, move together? A swaption on the ten-year rate says nothing about how the ten-year moves relative to the two-year, and no collection of single-rate smiles ever will: they are marginals, and marginals do not determine a joint distribution. That is the subject of chapter 12 and chapter 13, and chapter 18 is about the general fact underneath it.
The separation is real rather than expositional. It is why a CMS caplet needs one rate’s smile and no dynamics at all, as chapter 15 shows by replicating it statically, while a Bermudan needs the joint law and cannot be replicated from vanillas at any price. It is also why the two halves are calibrated to different instruments and, on most desks, by different people.
What the separation costs is stated in chapter 10: a smile fixes the marginal and leaves the dynamics free, so several models agreeing on every quoted price today can disagree about tomorrow. Fitting the first question perfectly does not begin to answer the second.
One convention, since it saves writing every statement twice. These three chapters say “spot”, “forward” and “strike” because the results hold for any underlying, and the equity notation is the one they were discovered in. For a rates reader the translation is fixed: read the underlying as a forward rate under its forward measure or a swap rate under its annuity, and read a discounted expectation as one taken under that numeraire. Nothing else changes; chapter 12 picks the curve back up where this leaves it.
9.1 Implied Volatility
Chapter 5 gave us a formula. Given the forward , a strike , an expiry and a volatility , it returns a price. Everything on that list except can be read off a contract or a screen. So a trader quoting an option is really quoting one number, and rather than quote it as a price, the market quotes it as the volatility that would produce that price.
Definition 9.1 (Implied volatility).
The implied volatility of an option with observed price is the number satisfying
Before using this we should check it makes sense.
Lemma 9.2.
For a price strictly between its no-arbitrage bounds, the implied volatility exists and is unique.
Proof.
The Black price is continuous in and its derivative, the vega, is
for , where is the standard normal density. A continuous, strictly increasing function is invertible on its range. As the price tends to the intrinsic value and as it tends to , so the range is exactly the interval between the bounds. ∎
In words: turning the volatility dial always moves the price, and always in the same direction, so from a price you can always work backwards to exactly one volatility. That is all a quoting convention needs. Notice what the lemma does not say. It says nothing about whether the underlying is lognormal, or whether any model is right. It says only that this particular formula is a reversible way of writing down a number. The implementation is implied_vol_black76 in quant/src/black.rs, and it does exactly what the proof does: it brackets the answer and squeezes.
Now the observation that this whole part of the notes exists to explain. If the Black-Scholes model were literally true, the same would appear in every option on the same underlying, whatever its strike. So plotting implied volatility against strike would give a horizontal line. It does not. What one sees instead is called the smile, or, when it slopes, the skew.