Quantitative Finance

We build the time series of optimal realized portfolio weights from high-frequency data and we suggest a novel Dynamic Conditional Weights (DCW) model for their dynamics. DCW is benchmarked against popular model-based and model-free specifications in terms of weights forecasts and portfolio allocations. Next to portfolio variance, certainty equivalent and turnover, we introduce the break-even transaction costs as an additional measure that identifies the range of transaction costs for which one allocation is preferred to another. By comparing minimum-variance portfolios built on the components of the Dow Jones 30 Index, the proposed DCW overall attains the best allocations with respect to the measures considered, for any degree of risk-aversion, transaction costs and exposure.

In order to price contingent claims one needs to first understand the dynamics of these indices. Here we provide a first econometric analysis of the CRIX family within a time-series framework. The key steps of our analysis include model selection, estimation and testing. Linear dependence is removed by an ARIMA model, the diagnostic checking resulted in an ARIMA(2,0,2) model for the available sample period from Aug 1st, 2014 to April 6th, 2016. The model residuals showed the well known phenomenon of volatility clustering. Therefore a further refinement lead us to an ARIMA(2,0,2)-t-GARCH(1,1) process. This specification conveniently takes care of fat-tail properties that are typical for financial markets. The multivariate GARCH models are implemented on the CRIX index family to explore the interaction.

A geometric method to analyze nonlinear oscillations is discussed. We consider a nonlinear oscillation modeled by a second order ordinary differential equation without specifying the function form. By transforming the differential equation into the system of first order ordinary differential equations, the trajectory is embedded in R 3 as a curve, and thereby the time evolution of the original state can be translated into the behavior of the curve in R 3 , or the vector field along the curve. We analyze the vector field to investigate the dynamic properties of a nonlinear oscillation. While the function form of the model is unspecified, the vector fields and those associated quantities can be estimated by a nonparametric filtering method. We apply the proposed analysis to the time series of the Japanese stock price index. The application shows that the vector field and its derivative will be used as the tools of picking up various signals that help understanding of the dynamic properties of the stock price index.

We propose a new data-driven method to select the optimal number of relevant components in Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This new method applies to correlation matrices whose time autocorrelation function decays more slowly than an exponential, giving rise to long memory effects. In comparison with other available methods present in the literature, our procedure does not rely on subjective evaluations and is computationally inexpensive. The underlying basic idea is to use a suitable factor model to analyse the residual memory after sequentially removing more and more components, and stopping the process when the maximum amount of memory has been accounted for by the retained components. We validate our methodology on both synthetic and real financial data, and find in all cases a clear and computationally superior answer entirely compatible with available heuristic criteria, such as cumulative variance and cross-validation.

Fundamental variables in financial market are not only price and return but a very important role is also played by trading volumes. Here we propose a new multivariate model that takes into account price returns, logarithmic variation of trading volumes and also waiting times, the latter to be intended as the time interval between changes in trades, price, and volume of stocks. Our approach is based on a generalization of semi-Markov chains where an endogenous index process is introduced. We also take into account the dependence structure between the above mentioned variables by means of copulae. The proposed model is motivated by empirical evidences which are known in financial literature and that are also confirmed in this work by analysing real data from Italian stock market in the period August 2015 - August 2017. By using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that the model reproduces all these empirical evidences.

We present a symmetry analysis of the distribution of variations of different financial indices, by means of a statistical procedure developed by the authors based on a symmetry statistic by Einmahl and Mckeague. We applied this statistical methodology to financial uninterrupted daily trends returns and to other derived observable. In our opinion, to study distributional symmetry, trends returns offer more advantages than the commonly used daily financial returns; the two most important being: 1) Trends returns involve sampling over different time scales and 2) By construction, this variable time series contains practically the same number of non-negative and negative entry values. We also show that these time multi-scale returns display distributional bi-modality. Daily financial indices analyzed in this work, are the Mexican IPC, the American DJIA, DAX from Germany and the Japanese Market index Nikkei, covering a time period from 11-08-1991 to 06-30-2017. We show that, at the time scale resolution and significance considered in this paper, it is almost always feasible to find an interval of possible symmetry points containing one most plausible symmetry point denoted by C. Finally, we study the temporal evolution of C showing that this point is seldom zero and responds with sensitivity to extreme market events.

The stock market prediction has always been crucial for stakeholders, traders and investors. We developed an ensemble Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) model that includes two-time frequencies (annual and daily parameters) in order to predict the next-day Closing price (one step ahead). Based on a four-step approach, this methodology is a serial combination of two LSTM algorithms. The empirical experiment is applied to 417 NY stock exchange companies. Based on Open High Low Close metrics and other financial ratios, this approach proves that the stock market prediction can be improved.

In this paper we study the high frequency dynamic of financial volumes of traded stocks by using a semi-Markov approach. More precisely we assume that the intraday logarithmic change of volume is described by a weighted-indexed semi-Markov chain model. Based on this assumptions we show that this model is able to reproduce several empirical facts about volume evolution like time series dependence, intra-daily periodicity and volume asymmetry. Results have been obtained from a real data application to high frequency data from the Italian stock market from first of January 2007 until end of December 2010.

Faced with the growing research towards crude oil price fluctuations influential factors following the accelerated development of Internet technology, accessible data such as Google search volume index are increasingly quantified and incorporated into forecasting approaches. In this paper, we apply multi-scale data that including both GSVI data and traditional economic data related to crude oil price as independent variables and propose a new hybrid approach for monthly crude oil price forecasting. This hybrid approach, based on divide and conquer strategy, consists of K-means method, kernel principal component analysis and kernel extreme learning machine , where K-means method is adopted to divide input data into certain clusters, KPCA is applied to reduce dimension, and KELM is employed for final crude oil price forecasting. The empirical result can be analyzed from data and method levels. At the data level, GSVI data perform better than economic data in level forecasting accuracy but with opposite performance in directional forecasting accuracy because of Herd Behavior, while hybrid data combined their advantages and obtain best forecasting performance in both level and directional accuracy. At the method level, the approaches with K-means perform better than those without K-means, which demonstrates that divide and conquer strategy can effectively improve the forecasting performance.

The majority of stylized facts of financial time series and several Value-at-Risk measures are modeled via univariate or multivariate GARCH processes. It is not rare that advanced GARCH models fail to converge for computational reasons, and a usual parsimonious approach is the GJR-GARCH model. There is a disagreement in the literature and the specialized econometric software, on which constraints should be used for the parameters, introducing indirectly the distinction between asymmetry and leverage. We show that the approach used by various software packages is not consistent with the Nelson-Cao inequality constraints. Implementing Monte Carlo simulations, despite of the results being empirically correct, the estimated parameters are not theoretically coherent with the Nelson-Cao constraints for ensuring positivity of conditional variances. On the other hand ruling out the leverage hypothesis, the asymmetry term in the GJR model can take negative values when typical constraints like the condition for the existence of the second and fourth moments, are imposed.