The economic value of volatility timing with realized jumps

Nolte, Ingmar and Xu, Qi (2015) The economic value of volatility timing with realized jumps. Journal of Empirical Finance, 34. pp. 45-59. ISSN 0927-5398

Preview

PDF (paper-full)
paper_full.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.
Download (350kB)

Abstract

This paper comprehensively investigates the role of realized jumps detected from high frequency data in predicting future volatility from both statistical and economic perspectives. Using seven major jump tests, we show that separating jumps from diffusion improves volatility forecasting both in-sample and out-of-sample. Moreover, we show that these statistical improvements can be translated into economic value. We find a risk-averse investor can significantly improve her portfolio performance by incorporating realized jumps into a volatility timing based portfolio strategy. Our results hold true across the majority of jump tests, and are robust to controlling for microstructure effects and transaction costs.