A new fourth-order numerical scheme for option pricing under the CEV model

The empirically observed negative relationship between a stock price and its return volatility can be captured by the constant elasticity of variance option pricing model. For European options, closed form expressions involve the non-central chi-square distribution whose computation can be slow when the elasticity factor is close to one, volatility is low or time to maturity is small. We present a fast numerical scheme based on a high-order compact discretisation which accurately computes the option price. Various numerical examples indicate that for comparable computational times, the option price computed with the scheme has higher accuracy than the Crank–Nicolson numerical solution. The scheme accurately computes the hedging parameters and is stable for strongly negative values of the elasticity factor.