PRICING AND DELTAS OF DISCRETELY-MONITORED BARRIER OPTIONS USING STRATIFIED SAMPLING ON THE HITTING-TIMES TO THE BARRIER

We develop new Monte Carlo techniques based on stratifying the stock's hitting-times to the barrier for the pricing and Delta calculations of discretely-monitored barrier options using the Black-Scholes model. We include a new algorithm for sampling an Inverse Gaussian random variable such that the sampling is restricted to a subset of the sample space. We compare our new methods to existing Monte Carlo methods and find that they can substantially improve convergence speeds.