June 27th, 2012, 2:59 pm
Prepayment is too broad and complicated a topic to ask for a generic spreadsheet solution. There are a few different approaches. Some treat prepayment as a stochastic hazard process and solve for the optimal prepayment strategy, which is what you mentioned ("likened to an American call option"). This doesn't always make sense because in real life prepayment decisions are not always made optimally. An alternative approach is to model prepayment explicitly as a function of some other observable variables such as interest rate, yield spread, loan maturity etc.I have only dealt with mortgage prepayment but not loan, so judge for yourself if this is relevant.