Estimating volatility from recent high frequency data, we revisit the question of the smoothness of the volatility process. Our main result is that log-volatility behaves essentially as a fractional Brownian motion with Hurst exponent H of order 0.1, at any reasonable time scale. This leads us...

Previous literature has identified an effect, dubbed the Zumbach effect, that is nonzero empirically but conjectured to be zero in any conventional stochastic volatility model. Essentially this effect corresponds to the property that past squared returns forecast future volatilities better than...