Moving beyond Volatility Index (VIX): HARnessing the term structure of implied volatility

This paper considers how information from the implied volatility (IV) term structure can be harnessed to improve stock return volatility forecasting within the state-of-the-art HAR model. Factors are extracted from the IV term structure and included as exogenous variables in the HAR framework. We found that including slope and curvature factors leads to significant forecast improvements over the HAR benchmark at a range of forecast horizons, compared with the standard HAR model and HAR model with VIX as IV information set.     

基于已实现半协方差的投资组合优化

在传统的风险度量方法中,常见的协方差估计量并未区分资产收益的下侧风险和上侧收益,而一般的下偏矩估计量则存在非对称性和难以加总的缺点.本文引入已实现半协方差矩阵(RSCOV)作为风险度量进行波动率预测和投资组合研究.本文将RSCOV应用于两种常见的风险分散投资策略—风险平价(ERC)策略和全局方差最小(GMV)策略,并将机器学习中的在线加权集成(OWE)算法用于提升已实现波动率预测方法HAR-RV的样本外预测表现.通过研究发现,相比起已有的其他风险衡量方式,仅包含负向波动信息的下半RSCOV能够更好地被用于平衡组内各资产的风险贡献.基于A股市场2011-2018年的高频数据,本文通过实证研究发现,OWE-HARRV在月度预测步长下的效果优于HAR-RV,而下半RSCOV则能够使ERC策略以及GMV策略在保证一定平均收益的同时,降低了组合收益的极端损失.     

Predictive ability and economic gains from volatility forecast combinations

The availability of numerous modeling approaches for volatility forecasting leads to model uncertainty for both researchers and practitioners. A large number of studies provide evidence in favor of combination methods for forecasting a variety of financial variables, but most of them are implemented on returns forecasting and evaluate their performance based solely on statistical evaluation criteria. In this paper, we combine various volatility forecasts based on different combination schemes and evaluate their performance in forecasting the volatility of the S&P 500 index. We use an exhaustive variety of combination methods to forecast volatility, ranging from simple techniques to time-varying techniques based on the past performance of the single models and regression techniques. We then evaluate the forecasting performance of single and combination volatility forecasts based on both statistical and economic loss functions. The empirical analysis in this paper yields an important conclusion. Although combination forecasts based on more complex methods perform better than the simple combinations and single models, there is no dominant combination technique that outperforms the rest in both statistical and economic terms.     

Forecasting under model uncertainty: Non-homogeneous hidden Markov models with Pòlya-Gamma data augmentation

We consider finite state-space non-homogeneous hidden Markov models for forecasting univariate time series. Given a set of predictors, the time series are modeled via predictive regressions with state-dependent coefficients and time-varying transition probabilities that depend on the predictors via a logistic/multinomial function. In a hidden Markov setting, inference for logistic regression coefficients becomes complicated and in some cases impossible due to convergence issues. In this paper, we aim to address this problem utilizing the recently proposed Pólya-Gamma latent variable scheme. Also, we allow for model uncertainty regarding the predictors that affect the series both linearly — in the mean — and non-linearly — in the transition matrix. Predictor selection and inference on the model parameters are based on an automatic Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme with reversible jump steps. Hence the proposed methodology can be used as a black box for predicting time series. Using simulation experiments, we illustrate the performance of our algorithm in various setups, in terms of mixing properties, model selection and predictive ability. An empirical study on realized volatility data shows that our methodology gives improved forecasts compared to benchmark models.     

Combining multivariate volatility forecasts using weighted losses

The ability to improve out-of-sample forecasting performance by combining forecasts is well established in the literature. This paper advances this literature in the area of multivariate volatility forecasts by developing two combination weighting schemes that exploit volatility persistence to emphasise certain losses within the combination estimation period. A comprehensive empirical analysis of the out-of-sample forecast performance across varying dimensions, loss functions, sub-samples and forecast horizons show that new approaches significantly outperform their counterparts in terms of statistical accuracy. Within the financial applications considered, significant benefits from combination forecasts relative to the individual candidate models are observed. Although the more sophisticated combination approaches consistently rank higher relative to the equally weighted approach, their performance is statistically indistinguishable given the relatively low power of these loss functions. Finally, within the applications, further analysis highlights how combination forecasts dramatically reduce the variability in the parameter of interest, namely the portfolio weight or beta.     

Model averaging estimation for conditional volatility models with an application to stock market volatility forecast

This paper is concerned with model averaging estimation for conditional volatility models. Given a set of candidate models with different functional forms, we propose a model averaging estimator and forecast for conditional volatility, and construct the corresponding weight-choosing criterion. Under some regulatory conditions, we show that the weight selected by the criterion asymptotically minimizes the true Kullback–Leibler divergence, which is the distributional approximation error, as well as the Itakura–Saito distance, which is the distance between the true and estimated or forecast conditional volatility. Monte Carlo experiments support our newly proposed method. As for the empirical applications of our method, we investigate a total of nine major stock market indices and make a 1-day-ahead volatility forecast for each data set. Empirical results show that the model averaging forecast achieves the highest accuracy in terms of all types of loss functions in most cases, which captures the movement of the unknown true conditional volatility.     

A comparison of conditional predictive ability of implied volatility and realized measures in forecasting volatility

In a conditional predictive ability test framework, we investigate whether market factors influence the relative conditional predictive ability of realized measures (RMs) and implied volatility (IV), which is able to examine the asynchronism in their forecasting accuracy, and further analyze their unconditional forecasting performance for volatility forecast. Our results show that the asynchronism can be detected significantly and is strongly related to certain market factors, and the comparison between RMs and IV on average forecast performance is more efficient than previous studies. Finally, we use the factors to extend the empirical similarity (ES) approach for combination of forecasts derived from RMs and IV.     

Forecasting stock volatility in the presence of extreme shocks: Short-term and long-term effects

This paper introduces a novel generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity–mixed data sampling–extreme shocks (GARCH-MIDAS-ES) model for stock volatility to examine whether the importance of extreme shocks changes in different time ranges. Based on different combinations of the short- and long-term effects caused by extreme events, we extend the standard GARCH-MIDAS model to characterize the different responses of the stock market for short- and long-term horizons, separately or in combination. The unique timespan of nearly 100 years of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) daily returns allows us to understand the stock market volatility under extreme shocks from a historical perspective. The in-sample empirical results clearly show that the DJIA stock volatility is best fitted to the GARCH-MIDAS-SLES model by including the short- and long-term impacts of extreme shocks for all forecasting horizons. The out-of-sample results and robustness tests emphasize the significance of decomposing the effect of extreme shocks into short- and long-term effects to improve the accuracy of the DJIA volatility forecasts.     

广义自回归条件异方差模型加速模拟定价理论

研究了广义自回归条件异方差(GARCH)模型下方差衍生产品的加速模拟定价理论.基于Black-Scholes模型下的产品价格解析解以及对两类标的过程的矩分析,提出了一种GARCH模型下高效控制变量加速技术,并给出最优控制变量的选取方法.数值计算结果表明,提出的控制变量加速模拟方法可以有效地减小Monte Carlo模拟误差,提高计算效率.该算法可以方便地解决GARCH随机波动率模型下其他复杂产品的计算问题,如亚式期权、篮子期权、上封顶方差互换、Corridor方差互换以及Gamma方差互换等计算问题.     

破产准则下修正Heston波动的最优再保-投资决策

为了研究修正Heston随机波动率下保险公司最优再保-投资策略问题,在盈余水平服从扩散过程的假设下,运用随机动态规划原理,建立最小化破产概率准则的HJB方程,通过求解方程得到最优再保-投资策略和最小化破产概率的显式解,并分析了随机波动率对最优投资决策,最优比例再保险策略和最小破产概率的影响。