Forecasting the volatility of Australian stock returns: Do common factors help?

This article develops multivariate factor models for forecasting volatility in Australian stocks. We suggest estimation procedures for approximate factor models that are robust to jumps when the cross-sectional dimension is not very large, and also work with volatility measures that have been constructed so that they contain no jump components. Out-of-sample forecast analysis shows that multivariate factor models of volatility outperform univariate models, but there is little difference between simple and sophisticated factor models.