Tracking of Historical Volatility

Abstract

We propose an adaptive algorithm for tracking of historical volatility. The algorithm is built under the assumption that the historical volatility function belongs to the Stone-Ibragimov-Khasminskii class of $k$ times differentiable functions with bounded highest derivative and its subclass of functions satisfying a differential inequalities. We construct an estimator of the Kalman filter type and show optimality of the estimator's convergence rate to zero as sample size $n\to \infty$. This estimator is in the framework of GARCH design, but a tuning procedure of its parameters is faster than with traditional GARCH techniques.

20 pages, 4 figures