Forecasting hourly WTI oil front monthly price volatility densities

Abstract

Financial commodity markets have an impact on company values and cash flows, where price movements within frequent time intervals can be both significant and random. Understanding highly frequent price movements is both important and difficult. In this paper, I measured and forecasted volatility for high-frequency (mostly twelve hours per day) WTI Oil front month price movements from 2012 to 2024 (about 40,500 observations). I created a new stochastic volatility model for extracting latent volatility using the non-linear Kalman filter. Stable and strictly ergodic hourly price series, along with the BIC optimal non-linear (generic) general method of moments model coefficients, enabled this process. The latent volatility seemed to separate into two volatility factors. One factor that was very persistent suggested slow mean reversion, and one choppy strongly mean-reverting factor. The data dependence found in the factor volatility series suggested forecasting ability. I applied classical static forecasts and three machine learning regression techniques to predict one-step-ahead volatility. The two volatility factors and one summarizing exponential factor were reported, along with several fit measures, including the root mean square error and Theil's measure of covariance.

Keywords

• data dependency
• high frequency
• stochastic volatility
• international wti oil prices