Fractals
Abstract
Fractals have become increasingly useful tools for the statistical modelling of financial prices. While early research assumed invariance of the return density with the time horizon, new processes have recently been developed to capture nonlinear changes in return dynamics across frequencies. The Markov-switching multifractal (MSM) is a parsimonious stochastic volatility model containing arbitrarily many shocks of heterogeneous durations. MSM captures the outliers, volatility persistence and power variation of financial series, while permitting maximum likelihood estimation and analytical multi-step forecasting. MSM compares favourably with standard volatility models such as GARCH(1,1) both in- and out-of-sample.
Keywords
Bayesian filtering
Brownian motion
continuous time valuation
fractals
fractional Brownian motion
Lévy-stable processes
long memory models
Mandelbrot
B.
Markov-switching multifractal (MSM)
maximum likelihood
multifractal model of asset returns (MMAR)
multifractality
regime switching
self-similarity processes