Finite Difference Methods for the Black-Scholes Equation

Abstract: Financial engineering problems are of great importance in the academic community and BlackScholes equation is a revolutionary concept in the modern financial theory. Financial instruments such as stocks and derivatives can be evaluated using this model. Option evaluation, is extremely important to trade in the stocks. The numerical solutions of the Black-Scholes equation are used to simulate these options. In this thesis, the explicit and the implicit Euler methods are used for the approximation of Black-scholes partial differential equation and a second order finite difference scheme is used for the spatial derivatives. These temporal and spatial discretizations are used to gain an insight about the stability properties of the explicit and the implicit methods in general. The numerical results show that the explicit methods have some constraints on the stability, whereas, the implicit Euler method is unconditionally stable. It is also demostrated that both the explicit and the implicit Euler methods are only first order convergent in time and this implies too small step-sizes to achieve a good accuracy.