Volatility and price differentiation

In a rather surreal interview to the rather fantastically named Aurangzeb Naqshbandi and Hindustan Times editor Sukumar Ranganathan, Congress president Rahul Gandhi has made a stunning statement in the context of agricultural markets:

Markets are far more volatile in terms of rapid price differentiation, than they were before.

I find this sentence rather surreal, in that I don’t really know what Gandhi is talking about. As a markets guy and a quant, there is only one way in which I interpret this statement.

It is about how market volatility is calculated. While it might be standard to use standard deviation as a measure of market volatility, quants prefer to use a method called “quadratic variation” (when the market price movement follows a random walk, quadratic variation equals the variance).

To calculate quadratic variation, you take market returns at a succession of very small intervals, square these returns and then sum them up. And thinking about it mathematically, calculating returns at short time intervals is similar to taking the derivative of the price, and you can call it “price differentiation”.

So when Gandhi says “markets are far more volatile in terms of rapid price differentiation”, he is basically quoting the formula for quadratic variation – when the derivative of the price time series goes up, the market volatility increases by definition.

This is what you have, ladies and gentlemen – the president of the principal opposition party in India has quoted the formula that quants use for market volatility in an interview with a popular newspaper! Yet, some people continue to call him “pappu”.

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