Forecasting the High-Frequency Exchange Rate Volatility with Smooth Transition Exponential Smoothing

Smooth Transition Exponential Smoothing (STES) is a popular exponential smoothing method for volatility forecasting; whereby the success of the STES model lies in the choice of the transition variable. In this paper, three realized variance (RV), daily, weekly and monthly RV were used as the transition variables in STES methods to evaluate the performance of intraday data. While daily squared return is a noisy series, squared residual and daily RV were employed as the proxy for actual volatilities in this study. With five series of exchange rates, a comparative analysis was conducted for Ad Hoc methods, Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedastic (GARCH) models, and STES methods using various RV combinations. The empirical results showed that when daily RV was used as proxy for actual volatility, the traditional STES models and STES models with RV as the transition variables outperformed Ad Hoc methods and GARCH models under the RMSE evaluation criteria. Similar promising results were also observed for traditional STES models and STES models with RV as the transition variables under MAE evaluation. The MCS results generally reaffirmed the results from both the MAE and RMSE evaluation criteria.