**Abstract**

This book chapter investigated the place of backtesting approach in financial time series analysis in choosing a reliable Generalized Auto-Regressive Conditional Heteroscedastic (GARCH) Model to analyze stock returns in Nigeria. To achieve this, The chapter used a secondary data that was collected from www.cashcraft.com under stock trend and analysis. Daily stock price was collected on Zenith bank stock price from October 21st 2004 to May 8th 2017. The chapter used nine different GARCH models (standard GARCH (sGARCH), Glosten-Jagannathan-Runkle GARCH (gjrGARCH), Exponential GARCH (Egarch), Integrated GARCH (iGARCH), Asymmetric Power Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (ARCH) (apARCH), Threshold GARCH (TGARCH), Non-linear GARCH (NGARCH), Nonlinear (Asymmetric) GARCH (NAGARCH) and The Absolute Value GARCH (AVGARCH) with maximum lag of 2. Most the information criteria for the sGARCH model were not available due to lack of convergence. The lowest information criteria were associated with apARCH (2,2) with Student t-distribution followed by NGARCH(2,1) with skewed student t-distribution. The backtesting result of the apARCH (2,2) was not available while eGARCH(1,1) with Skewed student t-distribution, NGARCH(1,1), NGARCH(2,1), and TGARCH (2,1) failed the backtesting but eGARCH (1,1) with student t-distribution passed the backtesting approach. Therefore with the backtesting approach, eGARCH(1,1) with student distribution emerged the superior model for modeling Zenith Bank stock returns in Nigeria. This chapter recommended the backtesting approach to selecting reliable GARCH model.

**Keywords:** financial, time series, backtesting, GARCH, ARCH-LM
