TY - JOUR T1 - Pricing Discretely Monitored Barrier Options under Markov Processes through Markov Chain Approximation JF - The Journal of Derivatives DO - 10.3905/jod.2020.1.116 SP - jod.2020.1.116 AU - Zhenyu Cui AU - Stephen Taylor Y1 - 2020/11/11 UR - https://pm-research.com/content/early/2020/11/10/jod.2020.1.116.abstract N2 - We propose an explicit closed-form approximation formula for the price of discretely monitored single or double barrier options with an underlying asset that evolves according to a one-dimensional Markov process, which includes diffusion and jump-diffusion processes. The prices and Greeks of a discretely monitored double barrier option are explicitly expressed in terms of rudimentary matrix operations. In addition, this framework may be extended to include additional features of barrier options often encountered in practice—for example, time-dependent barriers and nonuniform monitoring time intervals. We provide numerical examples to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed formula as well as its ability to reproduce existing benchmark results in the relevant literature in a unified framework.TOPICS: Derivatives, optionsKey Findings▪ Markov chain approximations to stochastic processes are used to develop a simple closed-form pricing formula for discretely monitored barrier options.▪ This article explores prices and Greeks computations within the constant elasticity of variance model and Merton’s and Kou’s jump-diffusions models.▪ Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of the pricing technique both to re-create specialized results in related barrier option literature and to extend to multiple novel settings. ER -