Numerical solution of an optimal investment problem with proportional transaction costs

This paper mainly concerns the numerical solution of a nonlinear parabolic double obstacle problem arising in a finite-horizon optimal investment problem with proportional transaction costs. The problem is initially posed in terms of an evolutive HJB equation with gradient constraints and the properties of the utility function allow to obtain the optimal investment solution from a nonlinear problem posed in one spatial variable. The proposed numerical methods mainly consist of a localization procedure to pose the problem on a bounded domain, a characteristics method for time discretization to deal with the large gradients of the solution, a Newton algorithm to solve the nonlinear term in the governing equation and a projected relaxation scheme to cope with the double obstacle (free boundary) feature. Moreover, piecewise linear Lagrange finite elements for spatial discretization are considered. Numerical results illustrate the performance of the set of numerical techniques by recovering all qualitative properties proved in Dai and Yi (2009) [6].