Historical Volatility
factor.formula
The standard deviation of the daily return rate in the last K trading days is calculated as follows:
This formula is used to calculate the standard deviation of daily returns over the past K trading days, where:
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Historical volatility represents the standard deviation of daily returns over the past K trading days.
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The length of the time window is the number of recent trading days used to calculate volatility. It is usually 20-250 trading days, such as 20 trading days (about one month), 60 trading days (about three months) or 250 trading days (about one year). The choice of parameter K will significantly affect the estimated value of volatility and needs to be adjusted according to specific strategies and data.
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The daily return on the i-th trading day.
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The average daily return over the past K trading days.
factor.explanation
Historical volatility is a measure of how volatile a stock price has been over a period of time. Typically, historical volatility is negatively correlated with stock returns, which is consistent with the low volatility anomaly. This anomaly suggests that stocks with low historical volatility tend to provide higher risk-adjusted returns, possibly because the market underprices low volatility stocks. This phenomenon may be influenced by behavioral finance factors, such as investors' excessive pursuit of high-volatility stocks and neglect of low-volatility stocks. In addition, low-volatility stocks may show greater resilience in certain market environments (such as when the market is down). It should be noted that historical volatility only reflects past volatility and cannot fully predict future volatility.