This document presents a comparison of Gaussian and non-Gaussian stochastic volatility models for modeling financial asset returns. It estimates parameters for these models using a hidden Markov model approach on index fund daily return data from 2006 to 2016. The results show that non-Gaussian models generally perform better in terms of goodness-of-fit measures. Specifically, indexes for stocks, emerging markets and the Pacific performed better with a non-Gaussian assumption, while a bond index was nearly normally distributed. The document also discusses model specifications and concludes it would be interesting to relax independence assumptions between error terms.