Spectral characterization of the quadratic variation of mixed Brownian–fractional Brownian motion

Dzhaparidze and Spreij (Stoch Process Appl, 54:165–174, 1994) showed that the quadratic variation of a semimartingale can be approximated using a randomized periodogram. We show that the same approximation is valid for a special class of continuous stochastic processes. This class contains both semimartingales and non-semimartingales. The motivation comes partially from the recent work by Bender et al. (Finance Stoch, 12:441–468, 2008), where it is shown that the quadratic variation of the log-returns determines the hedging strategy.