Analysing movements in investor’s risk aversion using the Heston volatility model

Abstract

In this paper we intend to identify and analyze, if it is the case, an “epidemiological” relationship between forecasts of professional investors and short-term developments in the EUR/RON exchange rate. Even that we don’t call a typical epidemiological model as those ones used in biology fields of research, we investigated the hypothesis according to which after the Lehman Brothers crash and implicit the generation of the current financial crisis, the forecasts of professional investors pose a significant explanatory power on the futures short-run movements of EUR/RON. How does it work this mechanism? Firstly, the professional forecasters account for the current macro, financial and political states, then they elaborate forecasts. Secondly, based on that forecasts they get positions in the Romanian exchange market for hedging and/or speculation purposes. But their positions incorporate in addition different degrees of uncertainty. In parallel, a part of their anticipations are disseminated to the public via media channels. Since some important movements are viewed within macro, financial or political fields, the positions of professsional investors from FX derivative market are activated. The current study represents a first step in that direction of analysis for Romanian case. For the above formulated objectives, in this paper different measures of EUR/RON rate volatility have been estimated and compared with implied volatilities. In a second timeframe we called the co-integration and dynamic correlation based tools in order to investigate the relationship between implied volatility and daily returns of EUR/RON exchange rate.

Keywords

• implied volatility
• smile volatility
• dynamic correlation
• error correction model