My last blog post was about pricing of exotic options using F#. In that post I said "Apart from the Monte Carlo code, the fact that in F# all functions are
in the curried form means that composing the payoff functions using
partial function application is beautiful. This would be lambda hell to
replicate in C#."
The OO version of this would probably be built via composition: having a class implementing a IPayoff interface (implemented for Call and Put), and that would be used in implementations of IPathPayof, which would be implemented by AsianArithmeticMean, DoubleBarrier etc. The use of OO is to pull out the common implementation, but there's no state associated with any of these classes - it feels much nicer using function composition.
I've implemented a version in C++ using lambdas, and the functional composition is actually really nice. C++ has the std::bind method which means that any number of parameters can be partially applied even for functions not in the curried form.
The code can be found here: https://gist.github.com/taumuon/727c31f4a56518f91718
The most surprising thing was the speed increase - the equivalent algorithm in C++ is 20x faster than the F# code! For instance, running on my low-powered AMD A6-1450 powered laptop, the double barrier option took 45 seconds to calculate in F#, whereas it took 2.2 seconds in C++.
I did tweak the F# to instead of using Seq.unfold to create the asset path, it instead creates and mutates an array, and that reduced the running time by more than 25%.
EDIT: Jack Pappas has forked and modified the F# code so that its runtime is now in the same ballpark as the C++ code. The fork is here: https://gist.github.com/jack-pappas/d629a767823ca2f17967
I think there's scope to speed up both the F# and C++, by introducing parallelism and investigating GPGPU, which I hope to do if I don't get sidetracked.Labels: C++, Monte Carlo, QuantFinance