RustyQLib — Pricing Options using JSON or XML
RustyQLib is a lightweight quantitative finance library written entirely in Rust. It prices equity derivatives through JSON or XML contracts (a stateless pricing service in a single binary) or as a Rust library, with an emphasis on numerically validated implementations: every pricer is cross-checked against independent oracles, put-call parity, replication identities and cross-engine agreement in the test suite.
Highlights
- Six pricing engines — analytic closed forms, two analytic American approximations (Barone-Adesi-Whaley and Bjerksund-Stensland 2002), binomial tree, finite difference (log-spot Crank-Nicolson with Rannacher smoothing), and parallel Monte Carlo — behind one dispatch, so the same contract prices on any suitable engine.
- Four volatility frameworks — Black-Scholes, Dupire local volatility
(calibrated non-parametrically from an implied vol surface), Heston
stochastic volatility (semi-analytic characteristic-function pricing +
Monte Carlo) with Bates jump-diffusion extensions (Heston + lognormal
Merton jumps, and Heston + Kou double-exponential jumps, both priced
semi-analytically through the shared characteristic-function machinery and
calibrated by the same Levenberg-Marquardt transform-space pattern),
stochastic local volatility (Heston-style variance times a leverage
function calibrated to the Dupire surface by the particle / binning
method, so vanillas reprice while forward smiles stay stochastic),
and SVI / SSVI parametric implied surfaces (Gatheral,
Gatheral-Jacquier) — Levenberg-Marquardt smile and surface calibration,
Gatheral-Jacquier butterfly (
g(k)) and calendar no-arbitrage checks, and sampling into the pricing vol surface. - JSON and XML contracts and results, over a single shared schema.
- Market-standard infrastructure — discount curves with discount factors as the
source of truth (flat / zero rates / discount factors / forward rates in, any
compounding), volatility surfaces (flat, strike x expiry, moneyness, FX-style
delta quotes), robust implied vol, day counts, term-structure-consistent PDE
discounting, and holiday calendars with business-day conventions
(weekends-only, TARGET, NYSE, UK bank holidays, custom lists — rule-based,
any year): date adjustment (following / modified following / preceding),
settlement lags (
add_business_days), and periodic schedule generation (forward/backward with stubs). Autocallable observation dates can be calendar-generated (.autocall_schedule(3, Calendar::UsNyse)) or supplied explicitly (autocall_observation_datesin JSON), so observations never land on weekends or holidays. - Options on futures: European vanillas priced with Black-76, both standard (discounted premium) and futures-style (margined, undiscounted).
- Payoffs: European & American vanillas, cash- and asset-or-nothing binaries,
all eight barrier types (knock-in/out, up/down) with rebates (at hit or
at expiry) and double-barrier corridors (Ikeda-Kunitomo), Asian options (arithmetic /
geometric, fixed / floating strike), forward-start options, autocallable
notes with coupons and knock-in protection (incl. Phoenix certificates
with conditional and memory coupons), lookback options (floating and
fixed strike, Goldman-Sosin-Gatto / Conze-Viswanathan closed forms),
accumulators / decumulators (daily geared accrual with knock-out,
priced as a strip of barrier-option pairs or by Monte Carlo),
variance, gamma and corridor variance swaps (model-free replication
over any smile: DDKZ log contract, spot-weighted
S ln Scontract with exact carry adjustment, Carr-Lewis corridor truncation with exact corridor additivity; seasoned MtM with accrued realized variance and the exact GBM volatility-swap strike), cliquets / ratchets, reverse cliquets and Napoleons (capped-floored return strips, coupon-minus-losses and coupon-plus-worst-month structures; closed forms under Black-Scholes where the payoff permits, Monte Carlo under GBM or Heston), and multi-asset rainbow options (best-of, worst-of, spread, basket, exchange) on n correlated assets. Carry handles dividend yield, discrete cash dividends and stock borrow cost.
Products and engines
| Payoff | Analytic | Binomial | Finite difference | Monte Carlo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vanilla European | Black-Scholes / Heston CF | yes | yes (grid Greeks) | yes (+ stderr) |
| Vanilla on a future | Black-76 (discounted / margined) | — | — | — |
| Vanilla American | Barone-Adesi-Whaley / Bjerksund-Stensland 2002 (approx.) | yes | Brennan-Schwartz | two-pass Longstaff-Schwartz |
| Vanilla Bermudan (discrete exercise dates) | — | yes | Brennan-Schwartz on exercise dates | LSMC restricted to exercise dates |
| Perpetual American | Merton closed form (exact) | — | — | — |
| Binary (cash / asset) | closed form / Heston CF | yes | yes (Rannacher + cell averaging) | yes |
| Barrier (8 types, + rebates at hit / at expiry) | Reiner-Rubinstein + E/F rebate terms | — | absorbing boundary / parity | Brownian-bridge corrected (rebate at expiry) |
| Double barrier (knock-in / knock-out corridor) | Ikeda-Kunitomo image series | — | — | discrete corridor monitoring |
| Asian (arith / geo, fixed / floating) | Turnbull-Wakeman (fixed + Henderson-Wojakowski average-strike) / exact geometric (fixed + average-strike) | — | — | geometric control variate |
| Forward-start | Rubinstein (BS) | — | — | yes (incl. Heston forward smile) |
| Autocallable / Phoenix (conditional + memory coupons) | — | — | — | multi-date discounting; GBM / local vol / Heston |
| Rainbow (best/worst-of, spread, basket, exchange) | Margrabe / Kirk / moment matching | — | — | correlated terminal GBM |
| Accumulator / decumulator (geared, knock-out) | strip of Reiner-Rubinstein knock-out pairs | — | — | discrete daily knockout |
| Lookback (floating / fixed strike) | Goldman-Sosin-Gatto / Conze-Viswanathan (continuous) | — | — | discrete monitoring |
| Variance / gamma / corridor variance swap (+ GBM vol-swap strike) | model-free replication: DDKZ 1/K^2 kernel, S ln S contract with carry adjustment, Carr-Lewis corridor truncation | — | — | — |
| Cliquet / ratchet / reverse cliquet / Napoleon | forward-start call/put spreads (no global clamp; Napoleon MC-only) | — | — | per-period GBM or Heston paths |
Model availability: local vol runs on the FD and MC engines; Heston runs on the
analytic (vanilla + binary) and MC engines (all payoffs above except American
and rainbow). Rainbow options are a separate product type
("product_type": "rainbow_option") with per-asset spots/vols/dividends and a
correlation matrix; outputs include per-asset deltas and vegas.
Engine details
- Binomial lattice: six parameterizations behind one enum —
Leisen-Reimer (the default: strike-aware Peizer-Pratt, second-order
smooth convergence, at ~100 steps it matches CRR at 1000 — ~90x
faster), Cox-Ross-Rubinstein, Jarrow-Rudd, Tian, Trigeorgis and the
additive equal-probability tree — selected per contract (
tree_type,tree_steps). The engine lives incore::lattice, asset-class agnostic (payoffs and early exercise enter as closures), with two implementations: an optimized rolling-array engine (O(n) memory) and a diagnostic engine that keeps the full spot/value trees, the early-exercise boundary per layer, tree Greeks and wall-clock timing, plus aconvergence_studyhelper for step-ladder analysis. A trinomial lattice rounds outcore::latticefor fixed income: per-node branching (Hull-White edge-switching included), per-node discounting (the short rate lives on the node), and Arrow-Debreu state prices by forward induction — validated by repricing the Vasicek zero-coupon bond closed form on a mean-reverting clamped tree. A term-structure lattice (tree_term_structurein JSON,.tree_term_structure()on the builder) applies time-dependent parameters directly on the tree: a variance-equal time grid keeps the tree recombining under a vol term structure, while per-step probabilities and discount factors take each step's forward rate and carry from the curve — so rate timing (not just the zero rate to maturity) prices into early exercise. - Finite difference: theta-scheme in log-spot with per-node, per-step
coefficients (local vol ready), forward rates from the discount curve per time
step, cell-averaged terminal conditions for digitals, barrier-aligned absorbing
boundaries, and delta/gamma/theta read directly off the grid. Grid sizes are
configurable per contract. The numerical kernels live in a reusable
core::fd_solverstoolkit covering 1-D to 3-D problems: Thomas tridiagonal, Brennan-Schwartz and PSOR obstacle solvers (one- and two-sided), tensor-grid axis operators, and Douglas / Hundsdorfer-Verwer ADI time steppers with explicit mixed-derivative (correlation) terms — the machinery a 2-D Heston or hybrid three-factor PDE needs. - Monte Carlo: deterministic per-path RNG streams (bit-reproducible under rayon parallelism), low-discrepancy sampling through a Brownian bridge, exact/Euler/Milstein stepping, antithetic + moment matching, geometric control variates for Asians, Brownian-bridge barrier monitoring, and standard errors reported with every price. Greeks via common-random-number bumps.
- Analytic American approximations: Barone-Adesi-Whaley (
pricer: "BAW", quadratic approximation with a Newton solve for the exercise boundary) and Bjerksund-Stensland 2002 (pricer: "BS2002", two-step flat exercise boundary priced in closed form via the cumulative bivariate normal — a lower bound on the true price, generally the tighter of the two). Both price in under a microsecond, within a few cents of a fine tree, and return true American Greeks (unlike the tree, whose Greeks fall back to the European closed form). Use them when speed matters more than the last basis point. Perpetual American calls and puts have exact Merton closed forms (equity::perpetual), verified against the stationary pricing ODE, smooth pasting and the finite-maturity limit. - Calibration workflow: quoted option prices -> robust implied vols
(safeguarded Newton with arbitrage bounds) -> implied surface -> Dupire local
vol -> reprice anything, including barriers under smile dynamics. Heston
calibration fits all five parameters to vanilla quotes by
Levenberg-Marquardt in an unconstrained transform space (log/atanh).
The Heston/Bates calibration objectives price through the COS method
(Fang-Oosterlee Fourier-cosine expansion): one characteristic-function
sweep per expiry prices the whole strike strip, making a 20-strike smile
~90x faster than per-strike integration (
heston::cos_smile). The truncation range comes from numerically estimated cumulants (including the kurtosis term, so Feller-violated fat tails stay covered), deep ITM prices recover via put-call parity from the CF-implied forward, and the legacy P1/P2 integration is kept as the independent cross-check oracle — the two methods agree to ~1e-6 across the test grid. - Risk analytics (
risk): Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall in the standard flavors — historical, parametric normal, Cornish-Fisher higher-moment corrected, and delta-normal multi-asset VaR with the exact Euler component / marginal decomposition — plus scenario VaR/ES for an options book (delta-gamma-vega-theta from aggregated Greeks and full revaluation through the portfolio repricer, on shared scenarios so the difference isolates the Taylor error), EWMA / realized volatility, max drawdown, Sharpe / Sortino, the Kupiec VaR backtest, and TOML-configured stress MtM: named shock scenarios (relative / absolute bumps on spot, vol, rates and time, with per-underlying filters and key-ratetenorsrestricting a rate shock to part of the curve) prepared into bumped market data, checked against a configurable no-arbitrage guard (allow/warn/rejecton the minimum implied forward) and fully revalued, reported per trade and aggregated per scenario. - Adjoint Algorithmic Differentiation (
core::aad): a tape-based reverse-mode differentiator with operator overloading — write a pricer overVarand one backward sweep returns every input sensitivity at a fixed small multiple of pricing cost. Ships with the Black-Scholes closed form on tape (all six first-order Greeks from one sweep, validated to the library's closed forms) and pathwise Monte Carlo Greeks (delta / vega / rho differentiated straight through the simulation). - Numerical toolkits in
core: 1-D root finding (solvers: bisection, Newton-Raphson, secant, Halley, safeguarded Newton — pluggable by enum), multi-dimensional optimization (optimization: Levenberg-Marquardt, BFGS, conjugate gradient, steepest descent, Nelder-Mead, differential evolution — the fitting layer for Heston today, SABR / Nelson-Siegel tomorrow), FD linear solvers (fd_solvers, 1-D to 3-D), asset-agnostic Monte Carlo machinery (montecarlo: reproducible per-path RNG streams, Sobol with digital-shift scrambling, Halton with Cranley-Patterson rotation, Brownian bridge, stratified / Latin-hypercube sampling, control variates, moment matching, Welford statistics), an interpolation toolkit (interpolation: linear, cubic splines with natural / clamped / not-a-knot boundaries, shape-preserving PCHIP and Akima, bilinear grids and thin-plate splines for 2-D vol surfaces), and linear algebra (linalg: Cholesky / QR / SVD / symmetric-eigen decompositions with least-squares and pseudo-inverse solves, plus correlation repair — PSD-tolerant Cholesky and Higham's nearest-correlation projection, auto-applied to non-PSD rainbow correlation inputs).
Feature flags
The default build is the lean pricing library — no CLI, no XML, ~40% fewer transitive dependencies. Opt in to what you need:
| Feature | Adds | Extra deps |
|---|---|---|
| (default) | pricing, calibration, risk, JSON contracts | — |
xml |
XML contract input/output | quick-xml |
stress-config |
TOML stress-scenario files | toml |
cli |
the rustyqlib binary (implies xml, stress-config) |
clap, csv |
Benchmarks
cargo bench runs a criterion suite over the public API (one benchmark per
engine, implied vol, and a 1,000-option batch), with fixed seeds and grids
so runs are comparable; criterion flags statistically significant
regressions against the previous run. Indicative single-threaded numbers:
a fully-loaded Black-Scholes npv() (discount curve and vol surface
lookups included) runs in ~0.7 µs — about 1.5M prices/sec; a 20-strike
Heston smile prices in ~1.6 ms via the COS method vs ~137 ms by
per-strike integration (~90x, the ratio the calibration loop inherits);
an American put on a Leisen-Reimer 101-step tree prices in ~26 µs vs
~2.3 ms on the CRR-1000 tree at comparable accuracy.
Running the CLI
# price a single JSON file of contracts
# price every JSON file in a directory (parallel)
# build an implied vol surface from quoted options
# guided pricing in the terminal
Contract examples
Vanilla European call priced analytically (a flat rate builds a flat curve):
The same contract can carry richer market data and model choices:
Selected fields (all optional unless noted):
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
valuation_date |
pricing as-of date YYYY-MM-DD; defaults to today — set it for reproducible pricing and historical re-marking |
pricer |
Analytical, Binomial, FD, MC, BAW, BS2002 (analytic American) |
payoff_type |
vanilla, binary, barrier, asian, forward_start, autocallable |
exercise_style |
European (default), American, Bermudan (needs exercise_dates) |
exercise_dates |
Bermudan exercise dates ["YYYY-MM-DD", ...], strictly increasing; expiry is always exercisable |
binary_type, cash_amount |
cash / asset, cash paid when ITM |
barrier_type, barrier_level |
up_in, up_out, down_in, down_out |
averaging_type, asian_strike_type |
arithmetic/geometric, fixed/floating |
rainbow_type, assets, correlations, weights |
rainbow options: best_of, worst_of, spread, basket, exchange |
forward_start_date, strike_fraction |
forward-start options |
autocall_barrier, protection_barrier, autocall_coupon, autocall_observations, notional |
autocallable notes |
borrow_cost |
continuous stock borrow (repo) cost, part of the carry |
futures_settlement |
option on a future (Black-76): discounted (standard) or margined (futures-style); underlying_price is then the futures price |
cash_dividends |
discrete dividends [{"date", "amount"}]; escrowed model on analytic/tree/terminal-MC, jumps on path-MC and FD |
discount_curve |
flat, zero_rates, discount_factors, forward_rates |
vol_surface |
flat, strike_expiry, moneyness_expiry, delta_expiry |
mc_model |
gbm (default), local_vol, heston (needs heston params) |
simulation, mc_time_steps, mc_scheme, mc_sampler, mc_seed |
Monte Carlo controls |
fd_spot_steps, fd_time_steps |
finite difference grid |
tree_type, tree_steps |
binomial lattice: LeisenReimer (default), CRR, JarrowRudd, Tian, Trigeorgis, EQP; steps default 1000 |
tree_term_structure |
apply the discount curve's forward rates and the vol term structure per tree step (variance-equal grid) |
Working examples for every product live in src/examples/EQ/.
Monte Carlo outputs include the standard error (std_err) alongside price and Greeks.
XML contracts
Every contract can equally be written in XML — the input format is detected from the
content and the output format from the output file extension, so -o results.xml
writes XML and -o results.json writes JSON regardless of the input:
EQ
PV
EQ
ABC
100.0
C
vanilla
100.0
0.3
2027-07-17
0.05
Analytical
Conventions: elements are object fields; attributes are fields too (convenient for
enum tags such as type="flat"); <item> children make an array, including
single-element ones; scalars are inferred, so numbers become numbers while
2027-07-17 and C stay strings. See
src/examples/EQ/equity_option.xml, and convert
between formats with cargo run --features xml --example convert_format -- in.json out.xml.
XML is a syntax over the same data model — documents are transcoded to
serde_json::Value and deserialized with the same derives, so both formats share one
schema, one set of defaults and one set of validation rules, and every new product
supports both automatically.
Runnable examples
One file per product under examples/, each pricing across every
applicable engine and model with identity checks:
See examples/README.md for the full list.
Using it as a library
Build contracts with the fluent builder:
use EquityOptionBuilder;
use Engine;
use PutOrCall;
use Instrument;
// build() validates every input and the engine/payoff combination:
// an option that builds is guaranteed to price
let option = new
.spot
.strike
.flat_vol
.flat_rate
.dividend_yield
.years_to_maturity
.vanilla
.engine
.build?;
// one call returns value, all Greeks and (on MC engines) the std error
let result = option.price?;
println!;
// ...or use the per-Greek accessors individually
println!;
...or deserialize the same JSON the CLI consumes:
use EquityOption;
use EquityOptionData;
let contract: EquityOptionData = from_str?;
let option = from_json;
Lower-level building blocks are exported directly: YieldCurve, VolSurface,
DayCountConvention, the Payoff trait, Dupire LocalVol, HestonParams, and
the engine modules (blackscholes, binomial, finite_difference, montecarlo).
Design principles
- Contracts and market state are separable — instruments embed the
market they were built with (the stateless-service shape), and a
MarketDatasnapshot provides the desk shape: capture a book's market once,bump()it with named shocks (relative/absolute spot, vol, rate and time, per-underlying filters), and reprice the whole book under the bumped snapshot (book.npv_under(&market)), each position revaluing fully on its own engine. The TOML stress runner is a consumer of these primitives. - Discount factors are state, rates are views — curves store pillar dfs; zero/forward rates in any compounding are derived on demand. Vol surfaces canonicalize every quoting style into per-expiry smiles with total-variance time interpolation.
- One payoff trait, every engine — payoffs implement
payoff(spot, strike)and (for path dependence)path_payoff(path, strike); adding a payoff makes it price on every compatible engine without engine changes. - Validated numerics — golden values against independently coded oracles, parity and replication identities at 1e-10, cross-engine agreement tests, and bit-reproducible Monte Carlo. Engines refuse unsupported combinations with a clear error instead of silently mispricing.
- Typed errors, no panics at the boundary — every fallible operation
returns
RustyQLibError(InvalidInputnaming the offending field,UnsupportedEngine,CalibrationFailedwith iterations and residual,NumericalError,ParseError). Pricing is fallible viaInstrument::try_npv()/try_from_json(); the infalliblenpv()/from_json()remain as conveniences for validated instruments.Instrument::price()returns a structuredPricingResult { pv, greeks, std_err }— value, all nine Greeks and the Monte Carlo standard error from a single call.EquityOptionBuilder::build()validates every field and the engine/payoff combination up front, so an option that builds is guaranteed to price — and setter order never matters. Batch pricing reports failures per contract in the output'serrorfield and keeps going instead of aborting the file.
Roadmap
- Andersen QE scheme and American exercise (LSMC) under Heston; 2-D ADI finite difference for stochastic vol
- Barrier rebates, double/window barriers, seasoned Asians
- Rates: curve bootstrapping from deposits/FRAs/swaps onto the core curve type, swaps and swaptions; FX (Garman-Kohlhagen)
- Stulz closed forms for two-asset best-of/worst-of; per-asset smiles and path-dependent multi-asset payoffs; SVI smile parameterization with no-arbitrage checks; pathwise / likelihood-ratio Greeks
License
MIT — see License.