Liquidity Costs: A New Numerical Methodology and an Empirical Study.

Summary We consider rate swaps which pay a fixed rate against a floating rate in presence of bid-ask spread costs. Even for simple models of bid-ask spread costs, there is no explicit optimal strategy minimizing a risk measure of the hedging error. We here propose an efficient algorithm, based on the stochas-tic gradient method, to obtain an approximate optimal strategy without solving a stochastic control problem. We validate our algorithm by numer-ical experiments. We also develop several variants of the algorithm and discuss their performances in terms of the numerical parameters and the liquidity cost.