PAT - The Payoff Advantage Tool

Appendix - PAT Software

IES has developed a demo version of PAT software that allows the user a great deal of flexibility in searching for financially equivalent options on opposite sides of different markets. At this stage, PAT software finds financially equivalent payoffs for any European or American payoff, or for more sophisticated payoffs of portfolios consisting of numerous European or American options. Original payoffs can be entered into PAT software in one of the three ways: analytically, numerically, or graphically.

  • Analytic payoff entry works with formulas — the user can enter any formula that describes the payoff they are researching. The user can work in a 2D or 3D environment, and can assign variables to the functions. Most of the diagrams in this booklet were produced using this method.

  • Numerical payoff entry allows the user to enter the original payoff as the portfolio's values at different price points. This is most useful when the original payoff is too complicated to be described analytically. The PAT technology works equally well under these conditions, regardless of the level of complexity of the payoffs. The arbitrarily-chosen original payoff on page 26 was designed using this data entry method.
  • Graphical payoff entry enables the user to "draw" the original payoff on the screen by moving around the data points. This method is best used for researching any impact on the Asset 2 payoff in terms of Asset 1 that would be caused by a change on the Asset 1 payoff in terms of Asset 2 before the transaction is actually undertaken. This method is also excellent for learning and gaining intuition on how the underlying market symmetry dynamic works.

Additionally, this version of the PAT software provides the functions of scaling, rotating the three-dimensional images, printing, and exporting images.

The PAT demo software and all of the graphics in this booklet were produced using Matlab. We would like to thank The MathWorks, Inc. for providing us with Matlab — a software package unsurpassed in its ease of use for quickly developing workable software for experimental purposes, and in its extraordinarily powerful graphics capabilities.

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