Performance of GARCH models in forecasting stock market volatility

This paper studies the performance of GARCH model and its modifications, using the rate of returns from the daily stock market indices of the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange (KLSE) including Composite Index, Tins Index, Plantations Index, Properties Index, and Finance Index. The models are stationary GARCH, unconstrained GARCH, non‐negative GARCH, GARCH‐M, exponential GARCH and integrated GARCH. The parameters of these models and variance processes are estimated jointly using the maximum likelihood method. The performance of the within‐sample estimation is diagnosed using several goodness‐of‐fit statistics. We observed that, among the models, even though exponential GARCH is not the best model in the goodness‐of‐fit statistics, it performs best in describing the often‐observed skewness in stock market indices and in out‐of‐sample (one‐step‐ahead) forecasting. The integrated GARCH, on the other hand, is the poorest model in both respects. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The role of jumps in the agricultural futures market on forecasting stock market volatility: New evidence

In this study, we explore the effect of cojumps within the agricultural futures market, and cojumps between the agricultural futures market and the stock market, on stock volatility forecasting. Also, we take into account large and small components of cojumps. We have several noteworthy findings. First, large jumps may lead to more substantial fluctuations and are more powerful than small jumps. The effect of cojumps and their decompositions on future volatility are mixed. Second, a model including large and small cojumps between the agricultural futures market and the stock market can achieve a higher forecasting accuracy, implying that large and small cojumps contain more useful predictive information than cojumps themselves. Third, our conclusions are robust based on various robustness tests such as the realized kernel, expanding forecasts, different forecasting windows, different jump tests, and different threshold values.     

Power transformation models and volatility forecasting

This paper considers the forecast accuracy of a wide range of volatility models, with particular emphasis on the use of power transformations. Where one‐period‐ahead forecasts are considered, the power autoregressive models are ranked first by a range of error metrics. Over longer forecast horizons, however, generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity models are preferred. A value‐at‐risk‐based forecast assessment indicates that, while the forecast errors are independent, they are not independent and identically distributed, although this latter result is sensitive to the choice of forecast horizon. Our results are robust across a number of different asset markets. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A tug of war of forecasting the US stock market volatility: Oil futures overnight versus intraday information

This study is the first to examine the impacts of overnight and intraday oil futures cross-market information on predicting the US stock market volatility the high-frequency data. In-sample estimations present that high overnight oil futures RV can lead to high RV of the S&P 500. Moreover, negative overnight returns are more powerful than positive components, implying the existence of the leverage effect. From statistical and economic perspectives, out-of-sample results indicate that the decompositions of overnight oil futures and intraday RVs, based on signed intraday returns, can significantly increase the models' predictive ability. Finally, when considering the US stock market overnight effect, the decompositions are still useful to predict volatility, especially during high US stock market fluctuations and high and low EPU states.     

Modeling and forecasting commodity market volatility with long-term economic and financial variables

This paper investigates the time-varying volatility patterns of some major commodities as well as the potential factors that drive their long-term volatility component. For this purpose, we make use of a recently proposed generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity–mixed data sampling approach, which typically allows us to examine the role of economic and financial variables of different frequencies. Using commodity futures for Crude Oil (WTI and Brent), Gold, Silver and Platinum, as well as a commodity index, our results show the necessity for disentangling the short-term and long-term components in modeling and forecasting commodity volatility. They also indicate that the long-term volatility of most commodity futures is significantly driven by the level of global real economic activity as well as changes in consumer sentiment, industrial production, and economic policy uncertainty. However, the forecasting results are not alike across commodity futures as no single model fits all commodities.     

The predictive value of temporally disaggregated volatility: evidence from index futures markets

This paper examines the benefits to forecasters of decomposing close-to-close return volatility into close-to-open (nighttime) and open-to-close (daytime) return volatility. Specifically, we consider whether close-to-close volatility forecasts based on the former type of (temporally aggregated) data are less accurate than corresponding forecasts based on the latter (temporally disaggregated) data. Results obtained from seven different US index futures markets reveal that significant increases in forecast accuracy are possible when using temporally disaggregated volatility data. This result is primarily driven by the fact that forecasts based on such data can be updated as more information becomes available (e.g., information flow from the preceding close-to-open/nighttime trading session). Finally, we demonstrate that the main findings of this paper are robust to the index futures market considered, the way in which return volatility is constructed, and the method used to assess forecast accuracy. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Forecasting realized volatility of oil futures market: A new insight

In this study we propose several new variables, such as continuous realized semi‐variance and signed jump variations including jump tests, and construct a new heterogeneous autoregressive model for realized volatility models to investigate the impacts that those new variables have on forecasting oil price volatility. In‐sample results indicate that past negative returns have greater effects on future volatility than that of positive returns, and our new signed jump variations have a significantly negative influence on the future volatility. Out‐of‐sample empirical results with several robust checks demonstrate that our proposed models can not only obtain better performance in forecasting volatility but also garner larger economic values than can the existing models discussed in this paper.     

Trading volume and realized volatility forecasting: Evidence from the China stock market

The existing contradictory findings on the contribution of trading volume to volatility forecasting prompt us to seek new solutions to test the sequential information arrival hypothesis (SIAH). Departing from other empirical analyses that mainly focus on sophisticated testing methods, this research offers new insights into the volume-volatility nexus by decomposing and reconstructing the trading activity into short-run components that typically represent irregular information flow and long-run components that denote extreme information flow in the stock market. We are the first to attempt at incorporating an improved empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method to investigate the volatility forecasting ability of trading volume along with the Heterogeneous Autoregressive (HAR) model. Previous trading volume is used to obtain the decompositions to forecast the future volatility to ensure an ex ante forecast, and both the decomposition and forecasting processes are carried out by the rolling window scheme. Rather than trading volume by itself, the results show that the reconstructed components are also able to significantly improve out-of-sample realized volatility (RV) forecasts. This finding is robust both in one-step ahead and multiple-step ahead forecasting horizons under different estimation windows. We thus fill the gap in studies by (1) extending the literature on the volume-volatility linkage to EMD-HAR analysis and (2) providing a clear view on how trading volume helps improve RV forecasting accuracy.     

Volatility spillover from the US to international stock markets: A heterogeneous volatility spillover GARCH model

A recent study by Rapach, Strauss, and Zhou (Journal of Finance, 2013, 68(4), 1633–1662) shows that US stock returns can provide predictive content for international stock returns. We extend their work from a volatility perspective. We propose a model, namely a heterogeneous volatility spillover–generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model, to investigate volatility spillover. The model specification is parsimonious and can be used to analyze the time variation property of the spillover effect. Our in‐sample evidence shows the existence of strong volatility spillover from the US to five major stock markets and indicates that the spillover was stronger during business cycle recessions in the USA. Out‐of‐sample results show that accounting for spillover information from the USA can significantly improve the forecasting accuracy of international stock price volatility.     

Modeling and forecasting aggregate stock market volatility in unstable environments using mixture innovation regressions

We perform Bayesian model averaging across different regressions selected from a set of predictors that includes lags of realized volatility, financial and macroeconomic variables. In our model average, we entertain different channels of instability by either incorporating breaks in the regression coefficients of each individual model within our model average, breaks in the conditional error variance, or both. Changes in these parameters are driven by mixture distributions for state innovations (MIA) of linear Gaussian state‐space models. This framework allows us to compare models that assume small and frequent as well as models that assume large but rare changes in the conditional mean and variance parameters. Results using S&P 500 monthly and quarterly realized volatility data from 1960 to 2014 suggest that Bayesian model averaging in combination with breaks in the regression coefficients and the error variance through MIA dynamics generates statistically significantly more accurate forecasts than the benchmark autoregressive model. However, compared to a MIA autoregression with breaks in the regression coefficients and the error variance, we fail to provide any drastic improvements.     

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.     

Modeling and forecasting the oil volatility index

The increase in oil price volatility in recent years has raised the importance of forecasting it accurately for valuing and hedging investments. The paper models and forecasts the crude oil exchange‐traded funds (ETF) volatility index, which has been used in the last years as an important alternative measure to track and analyze the volatility of future oil prices. Analysis of the oil volatility index suggests that it presents features similar to those of the daily market volatility index, such as long memory, which is modeled using well‐known heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) specifications and new extensions that are based on net and scaled measures of oil price changes. The aim is to improve the forecasting performance of the traditional HAR models by including predictors that capture the impact of oil price changes on the economy. The performance of the new proposals and benchmarks is evaluated with the model confidence set (MCS) and the Generalized‐AutoContouR (G‐ACR) tests in terms of point forecasts and density forecasting, respectively. We find that including the leverage in the conditional mean or variance of the basic HAR model increases its predictive ability. Furthermore, when considering density forecasting, the best models are a conditional heteroskedastic HAR model that includes a scaled measure of oil price changes, and a HAR model with errors following an exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity specification. In both cases, we consider a flexible distribution for the errors of the conditional heteroskedastic process.     

Time series forecasting using functional partial least square regression with stochastic volatility,GARCH, and exponential smoothing

We propose a method for improving the predictive ability of standard forecasting models used in financial economics. Our approach is based on the functional partial least squares (FPLS) model, which is capable of avoiding multicollinearity in regression by efficiently extracting information from the high‐dimensional market data. By using its well‐known ability, we can incorporate auxiliary variables that improve the predictive accuracy. We provide an empirical application of our proposed methodology in terms of its ability to predict the conditional average log return and the volatility of crude oil prices via exponential smoothing, Bayesian stochastic volatility, and GARCH (generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity) models, respectively. In particular, what we call functional data analysis (FDA) traces in this article are obtained via the FPLS regression from both the crude oil returns and auxiliary variables of the exchange rates of major currencies. For forecast performance evaluation, we compare out‐of‐sample forecasting accuracy of the standard models with FDA traces to the accuracy of the same forecasting models with the observed crude oil returns, principal component regression (PCR), and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) models. We find evidence that the standard models with FDA traces significantly outperform our competing models. Finally, they are also compared with the test for superior predictive ability and the reality check for data snooping. Our empirical results show that our new methodology significantly improves predictive ability of standard models in forecasting the latent average log return and the volatility of financial time series.     

Daily volatility forecasts: reassessing the performance of GARCH models

Volatility plays a key role in asset and portfolio management and derivatives pricing. As such, accurate measures and good forecasts of volatility are crucial for the implementation and evaluation of asset and derivative pricing models in addition to trading and hedging strategies. However, whilst GARCH models are able to capture the observed clustering effect in asset price volatility in‐sample, they appear to provide relatively poor out‐of‐sample forecasts. Recent research has suggested that this relative failure of GARCH models arises not from a failure of the model but a failure to specify correctly the ‘true volatility’ measure against which forecasting performance is measured. It is argued that the standard approach of using ex post daily squared returns as the measure of ‘true volatility’ includes a large noisy component. An alternative measure for ‘true volatility’ has therefore been suggested, based upon the cumulative squared returns from intra‐day data. This paper implements that technique and reports that, in a dataset of 17 daily exchange rate series, the GARCH model outperforms smoothing and moving average techniques which have been previously identified as providing superior volatility forecasts. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An outlier robust GARCH model and forecasting volatility of exchange rate returns

Since volatility is perceived as an explicit measure of risk, financial economists have long been concerned with accurate measures and forecasts of future volatility and, undoubtedly, the Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model has been widely used for doing so. It appears, however, from some empirical studies that the GARCH model tends to provide poor volatility forecasts in the presence of additive outliers. To overcome the forecasting limitation, this paper proposes a robust GARCH model (RGARCH) using least absolute deviation estimation and introduces a valuable estimation method from a practical point of view. Extensive Monte Carlo experiments substantiate our conjectures. As the magnitude of the outliers increases, the one‐step‐ahead forecasting performance of the RGARCH model has a more significant improvement in two forecast evaluation criteria over both the standard GARCH and random walk models. Strong evidence in favour of the RGARCH model over other competitive models is based on empirical application. By using a sample of two daily exchange rate series, we find that the out‐of‐sample volatility forecasts of the RGARCH model are apparently superior to those of other competitive models. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Forecasting the Daily Time‐Varying Beta of European Banks During the Crisis Period: Comparison Between GARCH Models and the Kalman Filter

This intention of this paper is to empirically forecast the daily betas of a few European banks by means of four generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) models and the Kalman filter method during the pre‐global financial crisis period and the crisis period. The four GARCH models employed are BEKK GARCH, DCC GARCH, DCC‐MIDAS GARCH and Gaussian‐copula GARCH. The data consist of daily stock prices from 2001 to 2013 from two large banks each from Austria, Belgium, Greece, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain. We apply the rolling forecasting method and the model confidence sets (MCS) to compare the daily forecasting ability of the five models during one month of the pre‐crisis (January 2007) and the crisis (January 2013) periods. Based on the MCS results, the BEKK proves the best model in the January 2007 period, and the Kalman filter overly outperforms the other models during the January 2013 period. Results have implications regarding the choice of model during different periods by practitioners and academics. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Trading volume and prediction of stock return reversals: Conditioning on investor types' trading

We show that contrasting results on trading volume's predictive role for short‐horizon reversals in stock returns can be reconciled by conditioning on different investor types' trading. Using unique trading data by investor type from Korea, we provide explicit evidence of three distinct mechanisms leading to contrasting outcomes: (i) informed buying—price increases accompanied by high institutional buying volume are less likely to reverse; (ii) liquidity selling—price declines accompanied by high institutional selling volume in institutional investor habitat are more likely to reverse; (iii) attention‐driven speculative buying—price increases accompanied by high individual buying‐volume in individual investor habitat are more likely to reverse. Our approach to predict which mechanism will prevail improves reversal forecasts following return shocks: An augmented contrarian strategy utilizing our ex ante formulation increases short‐horizon reversal strategy profitability by 40–70% in the US and Korean stock markets.     

The importance of interest rates for forecasting the exchange rate

This study compares the forecasting performance of a structural exchange rate model that combines the purchasing power parity condition with the interest rate differential in the long run, with some alternative exchange rate models. The analysis is applied to the Norwegian exchange rate. The long‐run equilibrium relationship is embedded in a parsimonious representation for the exchange rate. The structural exchange rate representation is stable over the sample and outperforms a random walk in an out‐of‐sample forecasting exercise at one to four horizons. Ignoring the interest rate differential in the long run, however, the structural model no longer outperforms a random walk. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley _ Sons, Ltd.