On the Guyon–Lekeufack volatility model

Guyon and Lekeufack (Quant. Finance 23:1221–1258, 2023) recently proposed a path-dependent volatility model and documented its excellent performance in fitting market data and capturing stylised facts. The instantaneous volatility is modelled as a linear combination of two processes; one is an integral of weighted past price returns and the other is the square root of an integral of weighted past squared volatility. Each weighting is built using two exponential kernels reflecting long and short memory. Mathematically, the model is a coupled system of four stochastic differential equations. Our main result is the wellposedness of this system: the model has a unique strong (non-explosive) solution for all parameter values. We also study the positivity of the resulting volatility process and the martingale property of the associated exponential price process.