The Quintic Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Volatility Model that Jointly Calibrates SPX & VIX Smiles

The quintic Ornstein-Uhlenbeck volatility model is a stochastic volatility model where the volatility process is a polynomial function of degree five of a single Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process with fast mean reversion and large vol-of-vol. The model is able to achieve remarkable joint fits of the SPX-VIX smiles with only 6 effective parameters and an input curve that allows to match certain term structures. Even better, the model remains very simple and tractable for pricing and calibration: the VIX squared is again polynomial in the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, leading to efficient VIX derivative pricing by a simple integration against a Gaussian density; simulation of the volatility process is exact; and pricing SPX products can be done efficiently and accurately by standard Monte Carlo techniques with suitable antithetic and control variates