Volatility derivatives are a class of derivative securities where the payoff explicitly depends on some measure of the volatility of an underlying asset. Prominent examples of these derivatives include variance swaps and VIX futures and options. We provide an overview of the current market for...

It is well known that high-frequency asset returns are fat-tailed relative to the Gaussian distribution, and that the fat tails are typically reduced but not eliminated when returns are standardized by volatilities estimated from popular ARCH and stochastic volatility models. We consider two...

This article investigates the merits of high-frequency intraday data when forming mean-variance efficient stock portfolios with daily rebalancing from the individual constituents of the S&P 100 index. We focus on the issue of determining the optimal sampling frequency as judged by the...

Estimation of integrated multivariate volatilities of an Ito process is an interesting and important issue in finance, for example, in order to evaluate portfolios. New non-parametric estimators have been recently proposed by Malliavin and Mancino (2002) and Hayashi and Yoshida (2005a) as...