“…Specifically speaking, using a long-horizon prediction model, we evaluate the predictability of monthly stock market realized volatility of South Africa, and the BRIC countries, with newspaper-based macroeconomic attention indexes (MAIs) of the US on eight fundamentals (unemployment, monetary policy, output growth, inflation, housing market, credit ratings, oil, and the US dollar) with comparisons drawn with a newspaper-based measure of US economic sentiment. Realized volatility, as captured by the (log) square root of the sum of squared daily log-returns (following [24]), is considered as an accurate, observable, and unconditional metric of volatility [25], unlike the measures of the same derived from the popular alternative types of GARCH models, that has been primarily used in the South African stock market context to capture volatility (see for example, [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36], and references cited therein), as well as the stochastic volatility (SV) framework. At this stage, it must be noted, within the GARCH-class of models, volatility analysis in South Africa has been dominated by univariate frameworks, and when multivariate-settings were indeed adopted to capture information of predictors, focus was primarily on domestic variables [37][38][39].…”