Principal component analysis in Finance

The main objective of this thesis is to summarize and possibly interconnect the existing methodology on principal components analysis, hierarchical clustering and topological organization in the financial and economic networks, linear regression and GARCH modeling. In the thesis the clustering ability of PCA is compared with the more conventional approaches on a set of world stock market indices returns in different time periods where the time division is represented by The World Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. It is also observed whether the clustering of DJIA index components is underlied by the industry sector to which the individual stocks belong. Joining together PCA with classical linear regression creates principal components regression which is further in the thesis applied to the German DAX 30 index logarithmic returns forecasting using various macroeconomic and financial predictors. The correlation between two energy stocks returns - Chevron and ExxonMobil is forecasted using orthogonal (or PCA) GARCH. The constructed forecast is then compared with the predictions constructed by the conventional multivariate volatility models - EWMA and DCC GARCH.