The Predictive Power of Implied Volatility in Option Pricing

Sammanfattning: During the last few years, financial derivatives have been growing in trading volume. There seem to be a high demand and supply of derivatives on the market and one common derivative is the option contract. The option contract is frequently the subject of studies and many different pricing models have been created for options. One popular model is the Black-Scholes model, that prices European call options. This project will look closer at the Black-Scholes model and its assumption that volatility remains constant. The project will try to establish what predictive power the implied volatility has for the sign of the price changes in the option’s daily closing price. The implied volatility is defined as the value of volatility that can be used in an option pricing formula to yield the current market price and goes against the assumption of constant volatility. The model consists of a dependent variable that is the binary variable for the sign of the price changes, 1 if positive and 0 if negative. The independent variables are implied volatility, volume, price of the underlying, and VIX. The models used for testing are logistic regression, CART, random forest and XGBoost. The research question is: Can the sign of option price jumps be predicted with the implied volatility? The answer to the research question is that there are indications for the implied volatility having predictive power when predicting the sign of the price changes in the option, even though the results are not conclusive across all models.