Futures-based forecasts: how useful are they for oil price volatility forecasting?

Oil price volatility forecasts have recently attracted the attention of many studies in the energy finance field. The literature mainly concentrates its attention on the use of daily data, using GARCH-type models. It is only recently that efforts to use more informative intra-day data to forecast oil price realized volatility have been made. Despite all these previous efforts, no study has examined the usefulness of futures-based models for oil price realized volatility forecasting, although the use of such models is extensive for oil price predictions. This study fills this void and shows that futures-based forecasts based on intra-day data provide informative forecasts for horizons that span between 1-day and 66-days ahead. More importantly, these results hold true even during turbulent times for the oil market, such as the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09 and the oil collapse period of 2014-15.