The Hansen-Lunde (HL) research program is generally first-rate, displaying a rare blend of theoretical prowess and applied sense. The present paper is no exception. In a major theoretical advance, HL allow for correlation between microstructure (MS) noise and latent price. (I prefer “latent price” to terms such as “efficient price” or “true price,” which carry lots of excess baggage.) In a para...

Several methods have recently been proposed in the ultra high frequency financial literature to remove the effects of microstructure noise and to obtain consistent estimates of the integrated volatility (IV) as a measure of ex-post daily volatility. Even bias-corrected and consistent (modified) realized volatility (RV) estimates of the integrated volatility can contain residual microstructure n...

A well developed literature exists in relation to modeling and forecasting asset return volatility. Much of this relate to the development of time series models of volatility. This paper proposes an alternative method for forecasting volatility that does not involve such a model. Under this approach a forecast is a weighted average of historical volatility. The greatest weight is given to perio...

We compare forecasts of the realized volatility of the exchange rate returns of the Euro against the U.S. Dollar and the Japanese Yen obtained both directly and through decomposition. Decomposing the realized volatility into its continuous sample path and jump components, and modeling and forecasting them separately instead of directly forecasting the realized volatility, is shown to lead to im...

Measuring volatility in financial markets is a primary challenge in the theory and practice of risk management and is essential when developing investment strategies. Although the vast literature on the topic describes many different models, two nonparametric measurements have emerged and received wide use over the past decade: realized volatility and absolute return volatility. The former is s...

Decreases in stock market returns often lead to higher increases in volatility than increases in returns of the same magnitude, and it is common to incorporate these so-called leverage effects in GARCH and stochastic volatility models. Recent research has also found it useful to account for leverage in models of realized volatility, as well as in models of the continuous and jump components of ...

We study the forecasting of future realized volatility in the foreign exchange, stock, and bond markets from variables in the information set, including implied volatility backed out from option prices. Realized volatility is separated into its continuous and jump components, and the heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) model is applied with implied volatility as an additional forecasting variabl...