arXiv subjects

Fearghal Kearney

Publications and source records attributed to Fearghal Kearney.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Intraday FX Volatility-Curve Forecasting with Functional GARCH Approaches

This paper seeks to forecast intraday volatility curves for major foreign exchange (FX) currencies using functional GARCH models. Intraday return curves are observed at a daily frequency, yet preserve the full high-frequency trading structure, enabling volatility analysis at the intraday level. We demonstrate that the USD/EUR, USD/GBP, and USD/JPY intraday return curves exhibit strong cross-dependence, while individually they are serially uncorrelated but display long-range conditional heteroskedasticity. Embedding cross-currency dependence via multi-level functional principal component analysis and adding intraday bid-ask spread curves as exogenous drivers significantly improves intraday and day-ahead volatility forecasts relative to functional and realised-volatility baselines. The precise volatility forecasts motivate the construction of intraday Value-at-Risk (VaR). An intraday risk management application highlights that predicted intraday VaR curves can help mitigate dramatic losses in intraday trading strategies, showcasing their practical economic benefits in FX markets.

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arXiv2021

Dynamic functional time-series forecasts of foreign exchange implied volatility surfaces

This paper presents static and dynamic versions of univariate, multivariate, and multilevel functional time-series methods to forecast implied volatility surfaces in foreign exchange markets. We find that dynamic functional principal component analysis generally improves out-of-sample forecast accuracy. More specifically, the dynamic univariate functional time-series method shows the greatest improvement. Our models lead to multiple instances of statistically significant improvements in forecast accuracy for daily EUR-USD, EUR-GBP, and EUR-JPY implied volatility surfaces across various maturities, when benchmarked against established methods. A stylised trading strategy is also employed to demonstrate the potential economic benefits of our proposed approach.

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arXiv2019

Implied volatility surface predictability: the case of commodity markets

Recent literature seek to forecast implied volatility derived from equity, index, foreign exchange, and interest rate options using latent factor and parametric frameworks. Motivated by increased public attention borne out of the financialization of futures markets in the early 2000s, we investigate if these extant models can uncover predictable patterns in the implied volatility surfaces of the most actively traded commodity options between 2006 and 2016. Adopting a rolling out-of-sample forecasting framework that addresses the common multiple comparisons problem, we establish that, for energy and precious metals options, explicitly modeling the term structure of implied volatility using the Nelson-Siegel factors produces the most accurate forecasts.

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arXiv2019

Uncovering predictability in the evolution of the WTI oil futures curve

Accurately forecasting the price of oil, the world's most actively traded commodity, is of great importance to both academics and practitioners. We contribute by proposing a functional time series based method to model and forecast oil futures. Our approach boasts a number of theoretical and practical advantages including effectively exploiting underlying process dynamics missed by classical discrete approaches. We evaluate the finite-sample performance against established benchmarks using a model confidence set test. A realistic out-of-sample exercise provides strong support for the adoption of our approach with it residing in the superior set of models in all considered instances.

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arXiv2018

Intraday forecasts of a volatility index: Functional time series methods with dynamic updating

As a forward-looking measure of future equity market volatility, the VIX index has gained immense popularity in recent years to become a key measure of risk for market analysts and academics. We consider discrete reported intraday VIX tick values as realisations of a collection of curves observed sequentially on equally spaced and dense grids over time and utilise functional data analysis techniques to produce one-day-ahead forecasts of these curves. The proposed method facilitates the investigation of dynamic changes in the index over very short time intervals as showcased using the 15-second high-frequency VIX index values. With the help of dynamic updating techniques, our point and interval forecasts are shown to enjoy improved accuracy over conventional time series models.

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