Paris-London: Pricing Partners (www.pricingpartners.com), the independent valuation expert and a world leader in mathematical models and analytics for derivatives and structured products, announced today that Simplex, a new optimization technique, has been implemented in the Price-it Library to enhance its calibration power. This unrivaled first-to-market algorithm, allows time dependent Heston Model parameters, accelerates calibration procedure and improves calibration accuracy. With this upgraded numerical method, Pricing Partners enriches Price-it Library and undoubtedly enhances its strong authority on cutting edge model expertise.
 
A calibration procedure is a necessary step during which market data (usually implied BS volatility) is used as input to determine the parameters of a financial model. The optimum research for those parameters enables the model to fit the best the input market data. However, calibration can be time consuming and depends on the size of the input data, on the number of parameters to calibrate and also on the calibration algorithm itself. Therefore, Pricing Partners tested several methods before picking this Simplex one. Simplex is a powerful method that optimizes calibration procedure and effectiveness. Compared with Levenberg Marquardt, the local and initial value sensitive algorithm, Simplex, a global algorithm, is the only robust and easy method which is irrelevant to initial input value. On the other hand, a model parameter can be either time dependent or constant. Unlike commonly used calibration methods on the market today, which only provide constant parameters, Simplex produces time dependent parameters. Simplex is suitable for the time dependent Heston Model, a model known for its competitive accuracy and speed. With this outstanding market fit algorithm, virtually any type of underlying derivative can be calibrated precisely by Pricing Partners.
 
Mr. Zaizhi Wang, financial engineer at Pricing Partners comments, “As a great advantage in Price-it solution, one can use either constant or time dependent parameters for a Heston model. Our newly implemented Simplex enables us to calibrate the time dependent parameters for a stochastic volatility models with a good fit on the entire volatility surface. Users can even choose constant or time dependent parameters. They can also easily retrieve calibration error and quickly measure the overall fitting error for the entire smile surface. I consider the Simplex algorithm robust and reliable in calibration.”
 
Pricing Partners CEO, Mr. Eric Benhamou adds, “Calibration is key to valuation. Improving the calibration enables us to provide more accurate models and provide unmatched precision in our valuation. Time dependent stochastic volatility models are currently the latest cutting edge models and generate smile and forward smile very consistent to the market. Proving powerful calibration sets therefore gives us a clear advantage to our competitors and positions us as a leading independent valuation and analytics provider”
 
Founded by former professionals of the trading floor, working in investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Société Générale, Natixis or HSBC, in the past two years Pricing Partners has become over a major player in the financial field. In October 2008, Pricing Partners launched its Internet independent valuation platform, Price-it® Online, which affirms its leading place in financial modeling as well as an independent valuations provider. Designed for all major assets like Interest Rates, Equity, Inflation, Credit, Foreign Exchange, Commodities, and Life Insurance to Hybrid products, Price-it® comes either as a software tools or an Internet Platform, providing all the tools for the transparent valuation on structured products. Price-it® online uses cutting edge mathematical models together with a new language to describe the complexity of any structured products. 
 
 
 
 
 
About Pricing Partners
Set up by former professionals of the trading industry, Pricing Partners offers accurate solutions for derivatives products valuation, pricing tools and risk analytics. Thanks to Price-it online, a SaaS platform, Pricing Partners provides independent valuation from the vanilla to the most exotic financial products on most assets (Interest Rates, Fixed Income, Equity, Inflation, Credit, Foreign Exchange, Commodities, Life Insurance and Hybrid products). Pricing Partners develops and commercializes Price-it Excel, an analytic and independent pricing library using a generic payoff language description which allows the pricing of virtually any financial derivatives. Price-it also supports VaR, CVaR and the most common risk management tools. Pricing Partners is the only company completely mastering the chain of valuation, developing both its own pricing library and a valuation platform, which give its clients very accurate and reliable valuation as a result of its intrinsic knowledge of the pricing tools. Pricing Partners solutions can be used by investment banks, buy side firms, hedge funds, financial departments, trading rooms and audit firms.
 
Pricing Partners has also signed numerous partnerships to distribute its technology with leading institutions like NYSE Euronext (for its independent valuation service via Prime Source), Misys (for its pricing library integrated into Summit), CMA or Lexifi. It is a Microsoft IDEES partner, an IBM, Sun, Datasynapse and ActiveEon partner. Furthermore, it is a member of the grid research consortium GCPMF uniting BNP Paribas, Calyon, Ecole Centrale, EDF, ENPC, INRIA, Natixis, Misys, Pars VI University and Supelec and a global coordinator of the Credinext consortium, in collaboration with PrimeSource, Lunalogic, Ecole Polytechnique, ENPC, University of Marne La Vallée and INRIA.
 
Media Contact:
Yuxin Mao
Pricing Partners,
Direct: +33 1 55 26 42 00
Fax: +33 1 5526 42 03
Email: marketing@pricingpartners.com
http://www.pricingpartners.com