Cheapest-to-Deliver Collateral: A Common Factor Approach

Abstract: The collateral choice option gives the collateral posting party the opportunity to switch between different collateral currencies which is well-known to impact the asset price. Quantification of the option's value is of practical importance but remains challenging under the assumption of stochastic rates, as it is determined by an intractable distribution which requires involved approximations. Indeed, many practitioners still rely on deterministic spreads between the rates for valuation. We develop a scalable and stable stochastic model of the collateral spreads under the assumption of conditional independence. This allows for a common factor approximation which admits analytical results from which further estimators are obtained. We show that in modelling the spreads between collateral rates, a second order model yields accurate results for the value of the collateral choice option. The model remains precise for a wide range of model parameters and is numerically efficient even for a large number of collateral currencies.