Stochastic Volatility In Financial Markets

Stochastic Volatility in Financial Markets presents advanced topics in financial econometrics and theoretical finance, and is divided into three main parts. The first part aims at documenting an empirical regularity of financial price changes: the occurrence of sudden and persistent changes of financial markets volatility. This phenomenon, technically termed `stochastic volatility', or `conditional heteroskedasticity', has been well known for at least 20 years; in this part, further, useful theoretical properties of conditionally heteroskedastic models are uncovered. The second part goes beyond the statistical aspects of stochastic volatility models: it constructs and uses new fully articulated, theoretically-sounded financial asset pricing models that allow for the presence of conditional heteroskedasticity. The third part shows how the inclusion of the statistical aspects of stochastic volatility in a rigorous economic scheme can be faced from an empirical standpoint.

This book, first published in 2000, addresses pricing and hedging derivative securities in uncertain and changing market volatility.

Building upon the ideas introduced in their previous book, Derivatives in Financial Markets with Stochastic Volatility, the authors study the pricing and hedging of financial derivatives under stochastic volatility in equity, interest-rate, and credit markets. They present and analyze multiscale stochastic volatility models and asymptotic approximations. These can be used in equity markets, for instance, to link the prices of path-dependent exotic instruments to market implied volatilities. The methods are also used for interest rate and credit derivatives. Other applications considered include variance-reduction techniques, portfolio optimization, forward-looking estimation of CAPM 'beta', and the Heston model and generalizations of it. 'Off-the-shelf' formulas and calibration tools are provided to ease the transition for practitioners who adopt this new method. The attention to detail and explicit presentation make this also an excellent text for a graduate course in financial and applied mathematics.

A stochastic volatility model where volatility was driven solely by a latent variable called news was estimated for three stock indices. A Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm was used for estimating Bayesian parameters and filtering volatilities. Volatility persistence being close to one was consistent with both volatility clustering and mean reversion. Filtering showed highly volatile markets, reflecting frequent pertinent news. Diagnostics showed no model failure, although specification improvements were always possible. The model corroborated stylized findings in volatility modeling and has potential value for market participants in asset pricing and risk management, as well as for policymakers in the design of macroeconomic policies conducive to less volatile financial markets.

Stochastic volatility is the main concept used in the fields of financial economics and mathematical finance to deal with time-varying volatility in financial markets. This work brings together some of the main papers that have influenced this field, andshows that the development of this subject has been highly multidisciplinary.

The famous Black-Scholes model was the starting point of a new financial industry and has been a very important pillar of all options trading since. One of its core assumptions is that the volatility of the underlying asset is constant. It was realised early that one has to specify a dynamic on the volatility itself to get closer to market behaviour. There are mainly two aspects making this fact apparent. Considering historical evolution of volatility by analysing time series data one observes erratic behaviour over time. Secondly, backing out implied volatility from daily traded plain vanilla options, the volatility changes with strike. The most common realisations of this phenomenon are the implied volatility smile or skew. The natural question arises how to extend the Black-Scholes model appropriately. Within this book the concept of stochastic volatility is analysed and discussed with special regard to the numerical problems occurring either in calibrating the model to the market implied volatility surface or in the numerical simulation of the two-dimensional system of stochastic differential equations required to price non-vanilla financial derivatives. We introduce a new stochastic volatility model, the so-called Hyp-Hyp model, and use Watanabe's calculus to find an analytical approximation to the model implied volatility. Further, the class of affine diffusion models, such as Heston, is analysed in view of using the characteristic function and Fourier inversion techniques to value European derivatives.