Modeling Asset Volatility

I am planning a series of posts on the subject of asset volatility and option pricing and thought I would begin with a survey of some of the central ideas. The attached presentation on Modeling Asset Volatility sets out the foundation for a number of key concepts and the basis for the research to follow.

Perhaps the most important feature of volatility is that it is stochastic rather than constant, as envisioned in the Black Scholes framework.  The presentation addresses this issue by identifying some of the chief stylized facts about volatility processes and how they can be modelled.  Certain characteristics of volatility are well known to most analysts, such as, for instance, its tendency to “cluster” in periods of higher and lower volatility.  However, there are many other typical features that are less often rehearsed and these too are examined in the presentation.

Long Memory
For example, while it is true that GARCH models do a fine job of modeling the clustering effect  they typically fail to capture one of the most important features of volatility processes – long term serial autocorrelation.  In the typical GARCH model autocorrelations die away approximately exponentially, and historical events are seen to have little influence on the behaviour of the process very far into the future.  In volatility processes that is typically not the case, however:  autocorrelations die away very slowly and historical events may continue to affect the process many weeks, months or even years ahead.

Volatility Direction Prediction Accuracy
Volatility Direction Prediction Accuracy

There are two immediate and very important consequences of this feature.  The first is that volatility processes will tend to trend over long periods – a characteristic of Black Noise or Fractionally Integrated processes, compared to the White Noise behavior that typically characterizes asset return processes.  Secondly, and again in contrast with asset return processes, volatility processes are inherently predictable, being conditioned to a significant degree on past behavior.  The presentation considers the fractional integration frameworks as a basis for modeling and forecasting volatility.

Mean Reversion vs. Momentum
A puzzling feature of much of the literature on volatility is that it tends to stress the mean-reverting behavior of volatility processes.  This appears to contradict the finding that volatility behaves as a reinforcing process, whose long-term serial autocorrelations create a tendency to trend.  This leads to one of the most important findings about asset processes in general, and volatility process in particular: i.e. that the assets processes are simultaneously trending and mean-reverting.  One way to understand this is to think of volatility, not as a single process, but as the superposition of two processes:  a long term process in the mean, which tends to reinforce and trend, around which there operates a second, transient process that has a tendency to produce short term spikes in volatility that decay very quickly.  In other words, a transient, mean reverting processes inter-linked with a momentum process in the mean.  The presentation discusses two-factor modeling concepts along these lines, and about which I will have more to say later.

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Cointegration
One of the most striking developments in econometrics over the last thirty years, cointegration is now a principal weapon of choice routinely used by quantitative analysts to address research issues ranging from statistical arbitrage to portfolio construction and asset allocation.  Back in the late 1990’s I and a handful of other researchers realized that volatility processes exhibited very powerful cointegration tendencies that could be harnessed to create long-short volatility strategies, mirroring the approach much beloved by equity hedge fund managers.  In fact, this modeling technique provided the basis for the Caissa Capital volatility fund, which I founded in 2002.  The presentation examines characteristics of multivariate volatility processes and some of the ideas that have been proposed to model them, such as FIGARCH (fractionally-integrated GARCH).

Dispersion Dynamics
Finally, one topic that is not considered in the presentation, but on which I have spent much research effort in recent years, is the behavior of cross-sectional volatility processes, which I like to term dispersion.  It turns out that, like its univariate cousin, dispersion displays certain characteristics that in principle make it highly forecastable.  Given an appropriate model of dispersion dynamics, the question then becomes how to monetize efficiently the insight that such a model offers.  Again, I will have much more to say on this subject, in future.

Forecasting Volatility in the S&P500 Index

Several people have asked me for copies of this research article, which develops a new theoretical framework, the ARFIMA-GARCH model as a basis for forecasting volatility in the S&P 500 Index.  I am in the process of updating the research, but in the meantime a copy of the original paper is available here

In this analysis we are concerned with the issue of whether market forecasts of volatility, as expressed in the Black-Scholes implied volatilities of at-the-money European options on the S&P500 Index, are superior to those produced by a new forecasting model in the GARCH framework which incorporates long-memory effects.  The ARFIMA-GARCH model, which uses high frequency data comprising 5-minute returns, makes volatility the subject process of interest, to which innovations are introduced via a volatility-of-volatility (kurtosis) process.  Despite performing robustly in- and out-of-sample, an encompassing regression indicates that the model is unable to add to the information already contained in market forecasts.  However, unlike model forecasts, implied volatility forecasts show evidence of a consistent and substantial bias.  Furthermore, the model is able to correctly predict the direction of volatility approximately 62% of the time whereas market forecasts have very poor direction prediction ability.  This suggests that either option markets may be inefficient, or that the option pricing model is mis-specified.  To examine this hypothesis, an empirical test is carried out in which at-the-money straddles are bought or sold (and delta-hedged) depending on whether the model forecasts exceed or fall below implied volatility forecasts.  This simple strategy generates an annual compound return of 18.64% over a four year out-of-sample period, during which the annual return on the S&P index itself was -7.24%.  Our findings suggest that, over the period of analysis, investors required an additional risk premium of 88 basis points of incremental return for each unit of volatility risk.

The Lognormal Mixture Variance Model

The LNVM model is a mixture of lognormal models and the model density is a linear combination of the underlying densities, for instance, log-normal densities. The resulting density of this mixture is no longer log-normal and the model can thereby better fit skew and smile observed in the market.  The model is becoming increasingly widely used for interest rate/commodity hybrids.

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In this review of the model, I examine the mathematical framework of the model in order to gain an understanding of its key features and characteristics.

The LogNormal Mixture Variance Model

Stochastic Calculus in Mathematica

Wolfram Research introduced random processes in version 9 of Mathematica and for the first time users were able to tackle more complex modeling challenges such as those arising in stochastic calculus.  The software’s capabilities in this area have grown and matured over the last two versions to a point where it is now feasible to teach stochastic calculus and the fundamentals of financial engineering entirely within the framework of the Wolfram Language.  In this post we take a lightening tour of some of the software’s core capabilities and give some examples of how it can be used to create the building blocks required for a complete exposition of the theory behind modern finance.

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Conclusion

Financial Engineering has long been a staple application of Mathematica, an area in which is capabilities in symbolic logic stand out.  But earlier versions of the software lacked the ability to work with Ito calculus and model stochastic processes, leaving the user to fill in the gaps by other means.  All that changed in version 9 and it is now possible to provide the complete framework of modern financial theory within the context of the Wolfram Language.

The advantages of this approach are considerable.  The capabilities of the language make it easy to provide interactive examples to illustrate theoretical concepts and develop the student’s understanding of them through experimentation.  Furthermore, the student is not limited merely to learning and applying complex formulae for derivative pricing and risk, but can fairly easily derive the results for themselves.  As a consequence, a course in stochastic calculus taught using Mathematica can be broader in scope and go deeper into the theory than is typically the case, while at the same time reinforcing understanding and learning by practical example and experimentation.