GARCH models applied on Swedish Stock Exchange Indices

Abstract: In the financial industry, it has been increasingly popular to measure risk. One of the most common quantitative measures for assessing risk is Value-at-Risk (VaR). VaR helps to measure extreme risks that an investor is exposed to. In addition to acquiring information of the expected loss, VaR was introduced in the regulatory frameworks of Basel I and II as a standardized measure of market risk. Due to necessity of measuring VaR accurately, this thesis aims to be a contribution to the research field of applying GARCH-models to financial time series in order to forecast the conditional variance and find accurate VaR-estimations. The findings in this thesis is that GARCH-models which incorporate the asymmetric effect of positive and negative returns perform better than a standard GARCH. Further on, leptokurtic distributions have been found to outperform normal distribution. In addition to various models and distributions, various rolling windows have been used to examine how the forecasts differ given window lengths.