Both the presentation and the notebook are part of the material presented in R/Finance 2017.

Applied Finance with R From the inaugural conference in 2009, the annual R/Finance conference in Chicago has become the primary meeting for academics and practioners interested in using R in Finance. Participants from academia and industry mingle for two days to exchange ideas about current research, best practices and applications. A single-track program permits continued focus on a series of refereed submissions. A lively social program rounds out the event.

I make a naive implementation of the forward algorithm in Stan for the Normal Mixed GARCH. Using series for an index and stock prices from companies in different industries, I find that belief states are shared across assets and the strength of the relationship varies for each pair of assets. This hints that volatility states follow a hierarchical structure: for example, the risk states of a global portfolio may be decomposed in Country + Industry + Stock Individual.

The (very) naive implementation of the algorithm in Stan is only meant for illustration. A few good practices were neglected, convergence is not guaranteed, there is much room left for optimization and fitting N different independent models is probably not a reasonable choice for production sampler. The main takeaway of this presentation is the ideas behind the code but not the code itself.

• R 3.3.3
• RStudio Desktop 1.0.136
• Rtools 3.3 (R 3.2.x to 3.3.x)
• Stan 2.14
• R Packages
  • RStan 2.14.2

• Luis Damiano - luisdamiano

A Quick Intro to Hidden Markov Models Applied to Stock Volatility is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0. See the LICENSE file for details.

• To the R/Finance Conference committee for accepting my proposal and generously providing travel funding.
• Special thanks to all those who showed me how much fun stats can be, a real life changer.