Empirical testing of models of autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity used for prediction of the volatility of Bulgarian investment funds

The relevance of the development is determined by the possibility of testing a complex analytical methodology for forecasting the daily volatility of Bulgarian investment funds, which will support the investment community in making adequate investment decisions. The used risk attribution quantification models GARCH (1.1), EGARCH (1.1), GARCH-M (1.1) and TGARCH (1.1) are adapted to predict the volatility of investment funds. The current development focuses on forecasting the risk concentration of investment funds (in Bulgaria) through the testing of complex, analytical and specialized models from the GARCH group. The object of the study includes quantitative analysis, estimation and forecasting of daily volatility through the models GARCH, EGARCH, GARCH-M and TGARCH with specification (1.1). The research covers the net balance sheet value of forty-two investment funds for the period from 13 July 2020 to 13 July 2023, where the results of the research show that according to three of the models GARCH, EGARCH and GARCH-M with the highest risk concentration the investment fund "Golden Lev Index 30" stands out. An exception to the thus formed trend is related to the TGARCH model in which the future conditional volatility is with the "EF Rapid" investment fund. When testing the models, we found that the GARCH model and the EGARCH model successfully optimize the regression parameters of the final equation for all analyzed investment funds, and as a result, valid forecasts are formed. In the case of the remaining two GARCH-M and TGARCH models, the impossibility of applicability of the model for some investment funds was found because of the optimization procedure, in which the parameters of the models have a value of zero. The present study is a unique mechanism for forecasting the daily volatility of Bulgarian investment funds, which further assists investors in risk assessment and is a prerequisite for making adequate and responsible investment decisions. The wide-spectrum toolkit of risk forecasting models allows their testing in investment funds with different risk natures (high-risk, balanced and low-risk). From a research point of view, in future research dedicated to modeling the risk attribution of investment funds, the analytical toolkit can be enriched with the following models: QGARCH, PGARCH, GJR-GARCH, IGARCH, SGARCH, AVGARCH, NGARCH and GAS. From a statistical point of view, we can apply the analyzed models to different probability distributions in order to describe the risky nature of investment funds.