Forecasting the Covolatility of Coffee Arabica and Crude Oil Prices: A Multivariate GARCH Approach with High-Frequency Data

Abstract

Forecasting the covolatility of asset return series is becoming the subject of extensive research among academics, practitioners, and portfolio managers. This paper estimates a variety of multivariate GARCH models using weekly closing price (in USD/barrel) of Brent crude oil and weekly closing prices (in USD/pound) of Coffee Arabica and compares the forecasting performance of these models based on high-frequency intraday data which allows for a more precise realized volatility measurement. The study used weekly price data to explicitly model covolatility and employed high-frequency intraday data to assess model forecasting performance. The analysis points to the conclusion that the varying conditional correlation (VCC) model with Student's t distributed innovation terms is the most accurate volatility forecasting model in the context of our empirical setting. We recommend and encourage future researchers studying the forecasting performance of MGARCH models to pay particular attention to the measurement of realized volatility and employ high-frequency data whenever feasible.