Chapter II: Understanding Price Volatility behaviour is essential to assessing the risk associated with positions across different time spans. |
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This chart shows Volatility for H&R Block, Inc., defined to be the price range as a portion of the average price: For instance, on 7/23/2010 the average price was 15.11 with a range of 0.31, indicating a Daily Volatility of 2%. The Daily Volatility is obtained by dividing the daily range by the daily average. A longer Volatility period such as Weekly Volatility is obtained by dividing the weekly price range by the weekly mean price. It is important to avoid confusing this with the weekly average of the daily volatility, which is a completely different concept. The red plot shows the actual price. The remaining marks on the plot correspond to the Volatility measured across several time intervals. Investors often make a distinction between the concept of Volatility, and the concept of Risk. Academics define them to be exactly equivalent, but as can be seen here, there is good reason to distinguish between the levels of volatility or risk experienced across different time frames. During 24 years, the Average Quarterly Volatility of HRB stock price has been 23% while the Average Daily Volatility has been 3%. |
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You may be familiar with the "yield curve" which shows how interest bearing yields vary according to term. Each Volatility Curve is a snapshot in time. As the timespan across which Volatility is measured increases, the Volatility is expected to increase. However, as seen in this plot of the HRB Volatility Curve, the increase is not constant. |
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This histogram is a frequency distribution of Daily Volatility, corresponding to the green points on the first chart on this page. |
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Similarly, the purple points on the top chart, the Quarterly Volatility Values, are subjected to frequency distribution here. |
Refined Volatility Risk Analysis for HRB : |
| Thursday, July 29, 2010: We have news on Automatic Data Processing, ticker symbol ADP. A significant moving average event has happened. Also, there are breaking events concerning St. Jude Medical, Inc. and W.W. Grainger, Inc.. From the News Archive: (7/28/2010 ) Favorable events happened at Cummins Inc. and Quest Diagnostics Incorporated. Meanwhile, bad news came from Harris Corporation and MetLife, Inc.. |