This paper characterizes the dynamics of jumps and analyzes their importance for volatility forecasting. Using high‐frequency data on four prominent energy markets, we perform a model‐free decomposition of realized variance into its continuous and discontinuous components. We find strong evidence of jumps in energy markets between 2007 and 2012. We then investigate the importance of jumps for volatility forecasting. To this end, we estimate and analyze the predictive ability of several Heterogenous Autoregressive (HAR) models that explicitly capture the dynamics of jumps. Conducting extensive in‐sample and out‐of‐sample analyses, we establish that explicitly modeling jumps does not significantly improve forecast accuracy. Our results are broadly consistent across our four energy markets, forecasting horizons, and loss functions. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 36:758–792, 2016

Researchers and practitioners face many choices when estimating an asset's sensitivities toward risk factors, i.e., betas. Using the entire U.S. stock universe and a sample period of more than 50 years, we find that a historical estimator based on daily return data with an exponential weighting scheme as well as simple shrinkage adjustments yield the best predictions for future beta. Adjustments for asynchronous trading, macroeconomic conditions, or regression-based combinations, on the other hand, typically yield very high prediction errors and fail to create market-neutral anomaly portfolios. Finally, we document a robust link between stock characteristics and beta predictability.

We analyze the variance risk of commodity markets. We construct synthetic variance swaps and find significantly negative realized variance swap payoffs in most markets. We find evidence of commonalities among the realized payoffs of commodity variance swaps. We also document comovements between the realized payoffs of commodity, equity and bond variance swaps. Similar results hold for expected variance swap payoffs. Furthermore, we show that both realized and expected commodity variance swap payoffs are distinct from the realized and expected commodity futures returns, indicating that variance risk is unspanned by commodity futures