This thesis captures the calibration of a FX hybrid model: The FX Black-Scholes Hull-White model. The main focus is on the calibration of the parameters in the Hull-White process: The mean reversion and the volatility parameter. The latter is commonly calibrated as a time-depende
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This thesis captures the calibration of a FX hybrid model: The FX Black-Scholes Hull-White model. The main focus is on the calibration of the parameters in the Hull-White process: The mean reversion and the volatility parameter. The latter is commonly calibrated as a time-dependent parameter, whilst the mean reversion parameter is not. This thesis covers the calibration of the mean reversion as a time-dependent parameter. A known method from the Literature is researched, where we calibrate the mean reversion independently from the volatility parameter to the ratio of two swaptions with the same expiry but different tenor. In our research this method is extended to the negative interest rate environment by assuming that the swap rate follows a shifted lognormal distribution instead of a lognormal distribution. We show that a specific set of swaptions can be chosen, so that the calibration problem is simplified. This choice leads to sequential calibration of convex optimization problems. Numerical results of calibration to artificial and market data are presented, where we compare our method to picking the mean reversion parameter arbitrarily. The findings suggest that the choice of mean reversion parameter affects the calibration procedure. Therefore, we argue that a calibration method for the mean reversion would be appropriate. Besides the focus on the Hull-White process, the calibration of the volatility parameter in the FX Black-Scholes process of the hybrid model is investigated. For the calibration of the FX volatility parameter ATM options on FX rates are used. Numerical results of calibration to artificial and market data are shown. A typical problem of calibration in the industry is discussed: Precision for late maturities. The results in this thesis suggest that this problem could be solved. For research on homogeneity constraints on the time-dependent parameters, the performance of delta-hedging is investigated. The delta-hedging is performed in a simple Black-Scholes world with time-dependent volatility. We show that given a fixed amount hedges beforehand and interest rate zero, there exists an optimal distribution of time points that will lead to equal variance on the profit and loss for every volatility function that has equal implied volatility from t0 to maturity T. Using this strategy, the homogeneity of the volatility parameter has no impact on the performance of delta-hedging. Therefore, in this thesis no homogeneity constraints are used for the calibration of the time-dependent parameters.