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Quant Research Lab

A quantitative finance research platform built from first principles to investigate option pricing, volatility forecasting, market regime detection, and decision-making under uncertainty.

Overview

This project explores how forecasting models, statistical learning techniques, and uncertainty quantification methods can be used to generate and evaluate volatility-based signals in financial markets.

The project combines:

  • Option Pricing
  • Volatility Forecasting
  • Machine Learning
  • Market Regime Detection
  • Signal Generation
  • Portfolio Construction
  • Risk Evaluation

The broader goal is to study predictive modeling and decision-making under uncertainty, with applications in quantitative finance, operations research, and industrial engineering.


Research Questions

  1. Can option pricing models be implemented and validated from scratch?
  2. How accurately can volatility be estimated and forecasted?
  3. Do market volatility regimes naturally emerge from historical data?
  4. Does disagreement between forecast volatility and market expectations contain predictive information?
  5. Can volatility-based signals generalize across multiple assets?

Methodology

Option Pricing

  • Black-Scholes Pricing Model

  • European Call Pricing

  • European Put Pricing

  • Greeks

    • Delta
    • Gamma
    • Vega

Numerical Methods

  • Monte Carlo Simulation
  • Finite Difference Validation
  • Newton-Raphson Implied Volatility Solver

Volatility Modeling

  • Historical Volatility
  • Volatility Smile Analysis
  • IV vs HV Comparison
  • GARCH(1,1) Forecasting

Regime Detection

  • Rule-Based Volatility Regimes
  • K-Means Clustering

Signal Generation

  • Forecast Volatility vs Market Expectations
  • Cross-Sectional Validation
  • Confidence-Based Signal Filtering

Portfolio Construction

  • Equal Weight Portfolio
  • Inverse Volatility Weighting
  • Confidence-Based Position Sizing

Key Results

Monte Carlo Validation

Metric Value
Black-Scholes Price 10.4506
Monte Carlo Price 10.4538
Difference 0.0033

Volatility Forecasting

Metric Value
Forecast Correlation 0.9833

Cross-Sectional Validation

Ticker Accuracy
AAPL 55.90%
MSFT 52.81%
NVDA 56.74%
AMZN 53.09%
GOOG 54.78%

Average Accuracy: 54.66%

Classification Metrics (AAPL)

Metric Value
Accuracy 56.18%
Precision 56.11%
Recall 56.74%
F1 Score 56.42%

Signal Optimization

Threshold Sharpe Max Drawdown
0% -0.11 -27.36%
5% 0.45 -13.31%
10% 0.64 -11.66%

Portfolio Optimization

Metric Baseline Optimized
Sharpe Ratio -0.19 -0.10
Max Drawdown -18.83% -3.19%
Total Return -4.47% -0.44%

Research Report

Full report available:

research/report/Quant_Research_Report.pdf


Technologies

  • Python
  • NumPy
  • Pandas
  • SciPy
  • Scikit-Learn
  • Matplotlib
  • yFinance

Future Work

  • Historical Options IV Data
  • Hidden Markov Models
  • EGARCH and GJR-GARCH
  • Volatility Surface Modeling
  • Portfolio Optimization Under Uncertainty
  • Stochastic Optimization
  • Risk-Aware Decision Frameworks

Author

Mehul Gupta

Master of Business Analytics, University of Illinois Chicago

Research Interests:

  • Operations Research
  • Quantitative Finance
  • Machine Learning
  • Optimization Under Uncertainty
  • Decision Analytics

About

Quantitative Finance Research Lab: Option Pricing, Volatility Forecasting, Regime Detection, and Signal Validation

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