Volatility Forecasting of Korea Composite Stock Price Index with MRS-GARCH Model

Volatility forecasting in financial markets is an important issue because it is directly related to the profit of return. The volatility is generally modeled as time-varying conditional heteroskedasticity. A generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic (GARCH) model is often used for modeling; however, it is not suitable to reflect structural changes (such as a financial crisis or debt crisis) into the volatility. As a remedy, we introduce the Markov regime switching GARCH (MRS-GARCH) model. For the empirical example, we analyze and forecast the volatility of the daily Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) data from January 4, 2000 to October 30, 2014. The result shows that the regime of low volatility persists with a leverage effect. We also observe that the performance of MRS-GARCH is superior to other GARCH models for in-sample fitting; in addition, it is also superior to other models for long-term forecasting in out-of-sample fitting. The MRS-GARCH model can be a good alternative to GARCH-type models because it can reflect financial market structural changes into modeling and volatility forecasting.