Trading With a Stock Chart Heuristic

The efficient market hypothesis (EMH) is a cornerstone of financial economics. The EMH asserts that security prices fully reflect all available information and that the stock market prices securities at their fair values. Therefore, investors cannot consistently ldquobeat the marketrdquo because stocks reside in perpetual equilibrium, making research efforts futile. This flies in the face of the conventional nonacademic wisdom that astute analysts can beat the market using technical or fundamental stock analysis. The purpose of this research is to partially assess whether technical analysts, who predict future stock prices by analyzing past stock prices, can consistently achieve a trading return that outperforms the stock market average return. This is tested using knowlege engineering experimentation with one price history pattern - the ldquobull flag stock chartrdquo - which signals technical analysts of a future stock market price increase. A recognizer for the stock chart pattern is built using a template-matching technique from pattern recognition. The recognizer and associated trading rules are then tested by simulating trading on over 35 years of daily closing price data for the New York stock exchange composite index. The experiment is then replicated using the horizontal rotation or mirror image pattern of the ldquobull flagrdquo (or ldquobear flagrdquo stock chart) that signals a future stock market decrease. Results are systematic, statistically significant, and fail to confirm the null hypothesis based on a corollary to the EMH: that profit realized from trading determined by this heuristic method is no better than what would be realized from trading decisions based on random choice.     

An intelligent stock trading system using comprehensive features

The aim of this study is to predict automatic trading decisions in stock markets. Comprehensive features (CF) for predicting future trend are very difficult to generate in a complex environment, especially in stock markets. According to related work, the relevant stock information can help investors formulate objects that may result in better profits. With this in mind, we present a framework of an intelligent stock trading system using comprehensive features (ISTSCF) to predict future stock trading decisions. The ISTSCF consists of stock information extraction, prediction model learning and stock trading decision. We apply three different methods to generate comprehensive features, including sentiment analysis (SA) that provides sensitive market events from stock news articles for sentiment indices (SI), technical analysis (TA) that yields effective trading rules based on trading information on the stock exchange for technical indices (TI), as well as the trend-based segmentation method (TBSM) that raises trading decisions from stock price for trading signals (TS). Experiments on the Taiwan stock market show that the results of employing comprehensive features are significantly better than traditional methods using numeric features alone (without textual sentiment features).     

A hybrid genetic-neural architecture for stock indexes forecasting

In this paper, a new approach for time series forecasting is presented. The forecasting activity results from the interaction of a population of experts, each integrating genetic and neural technologies. An expert of this kind embodies a genetic classifier designed to control the activation of a feedforward artificial neural network for performing a locally scoped forecasting activity. Genetic and neural components are supplied with different information: The former deal with inputs encoding information retrieved from technical analysis, whereas the latter process other relevant inputs, in particular past stock prices. To investigate the performance of the proposed approach in response to real data, a stock market forecasting system has been implemented and tested on two stock market indexes, allowing for account realistic trading commissions. The results pointed to the good forecasting capability of the approach, which repeatedly outperformed the “Buy and Hold” strategy.     

A type-2 fuzzy rule-based expert system model for stock price analysis

In this paper, a type-2 fuzzy rule based expert system is developed for stock price analysis. Interval type-2 fuzzy logic system permits us to model rule uncertainties and every membership value of an element is interval itself. The proposed type-2 fuzzy model applies the technical and fundamental indexes as the input variables. This model is tested on stock price prediction of an automotive manufactory in Asia. Through the intensive experimental tests, the model has successfully forecasted the price variation for stocks from different sectors. The results are very encouraging and can be implemented in a real-time trading system for stock price prediction during the trading period.     

A Multiagent Approach to Q-Learning for Daily Stock Trading

The portfolio management for trading in the stock market poses a challenging stochastic control problem of significant commercial interests to finance industry. To date, many researchers have proposed various methods to build an intelligent portfolio management system that can recommend financial decisions for daily stock trading. Many promising results have been reported from the supervised learning community on the possibility of building a profitable trading system. More recently, several studies have shown that even the problem of integrating stock price prediction results with trading strategies can be successfully addressed by applying reinforcement learning algorithms. Motivated by this, we present a new stock trading framework that attempts to further enhance the performance of reinforcement learning-based systems. The proposed approach incorporates multiple Q-learning agents, allowing them to effectively divide and conquer the stock trading problem by defining necessary roles for cooperatively carrying out stock pricing and selection decisions. Furthermore, in an attempt to address the complexity issue when considering a large amount of data to obtain long-term dependence among the stock prices, we present a representation scheme that can succinctly summarize the history of price changes. Experimental results on a Korean stock market show that the proposed trading framework outperforms those trained by other alternative approaches both in terms of profit and risk management.     

A Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy model combined with a support vector regression for stock trading forecasting

The turning points prediction scheme for future time series analysis based on past and present information is widely employed in the field of financial applications. In this research, a novel approach to identify turning points of the trading signal using a fuzzy rule-based model is presented. The Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy rule-based model (the TS model) can accurately identify daily stock trading from sets of technical indicators according to the trading signals learned by a support vector regression (SVR) technique. In addition, when new trading points are created, the structure and parameters of the TS model are constantly inherited and updated. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed TS fuzzy rule-based modeling approach, we have acquired the stock trading data in the US stock market. The TS fuzzy approach with dynamic threshold control is compared with a conventional linear regression model and artificial neural networks. Our result indicates that the TS fuzzy model not only yields more profit than other approaches but also enables stable dynamic identification of the complexities of the stock forecasting system.     

The effectiveness of the combined use of VIX and Support Vector Machines on the prediction of S&P 500

The aim of this research is to analyse the effectiveness of the Chicago Board Options Exchange Market Volatility Index (VIX) when used with Support Vector Machines (SVMs) in order to forecast the weekly change in the S&P 500 index. The data provided cover the period between 3 January 2000 and 30 December 2011. A trading simulation is implemented so that statistical efficiency is complemented by measures of economic performance. The inputs retained are traditional technical trading rules commonly used in the analysis of equity markets such as Relative Strength Index, Moving Average Convergence Divergence, VIX and the daily return of the S&P 500. The SVM identifies the best situations in which to buy or sell in the market. The two outputs of the SVM are the movement of the market and the degree of set membership. The obtained results show that SVM using VIX produce better results than the Buy and Hold strategy or SVM without VIX. The influence of VIX in the trading system is particularly significant when bearish periods appear. Moreover, the SVM allows the reduction in the Maximum Drawdown and the annualised standard deviation.     

Planning stock portfolios by means of weighted frequent itemsets

Planning stock portfolios is a challenging task, because investors have to forecast stock market trends. To limit losses due to wrong forecasts a common strategy is diversification, which consists in buying stocks belonging to different sectors/markets to spread bets across different assets. Since the amount of stock market data is continuously growing, an appealing research strategy is to first apply data mining algorithms to discover significant patterns from potentially large stock datasets and then exploit them to support investor decision-making.This article presents an itemset-based approach to supporting buy-and-hold investors in technical analyses by automatically identifying promising sets of high-yield yet diversified stocks to buy. Specifically, it investigates the use of itemsets to generate stock portfolios from historical stock data and recommend them for buy-and-hold investments. To achieve this goal, it analyzes stock market datasets, which contain for each stock the closing prices on different trading days. Datasets are enriched with (analyst-provided) taxonomies, which are used to classify stocks as the corresponding sectors. Unlike previous approaches, it generates a model composed of a subset of potentially interesting itemsets, which are then used to support investors in decision-making. The selected itemsets represent promptly usable stock portfolios satisfying expert’s requirements on minimal average return and minimal level of diversification across sectors.The experiments performed on real stock datasets acquired under different market conditions demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to real stock funds.     

An integrated framework of genetic network programming and multi-layer perceptron neural network for prediction of daily stock return: An application in Tehran stock exchange market

Evolutionary algorithms are generally used to find or generate the best individuals in a population. Whenever these algorithms are applied to agent systems, they will lead to optimal solutions. Genetic Network Programming (GNP), which contains graph networks, is one of the developed evolutionary algorithms. When the aim is to forecast the share price or return, ascending and descending trends, volatilities, recent returns, fundamental and technical factors have remarkable impacts on the prediction. This is why technical indicators are used to constitute a set of trading rules. In this paper, we apply an integrated framework consisting of GNP model along with a reinforcement learning and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural network to classify data and also time series models to forecast the stock return. Moreover, we utilize rules of accumulation based on the GNP model’s results to forecast the return. The aim of using these models alongside one another is to estimate one-day return. The results derived from 9 stocks with regard to the Tehran Stock Exchange Market. GNP extracts a prodigious number of rules on the basis of 5 technical indicators with 3 times period. Next, MLP network classifies data and finds the similarity between future data and past data concerning a stock (5 sub-period) through classification. Subsequently, a number of conditions are established, in order to choose the best estimation between GNP-RL and ARMA. Distinct comparison with the ARMA–GARCH model, which is operated for return estimation and risk measurement in many researches, demonstrates an extended forecasting power of the proposed model, by the name of GNP–ARMA, reducing error by a mean of 16%.     

A stock market portfolio recommender system based on association rule mining

We propose a stock market portfolio recommender system based on association rule mining (ARM) that analyzes stock data and suggests a ranked basket of stocks. The objective of this recommender system is to support stock market traders, individual investors and fund managers in their decisions by suggesting investment in a group of equity stocks when strong evidence of possible profit from these transactions is available.Our system is different compared to existing systems because it finds the correlation between stocks and recommends a portfolio. Existing techniques recommend buying or selling a single stock and do not recommend a portfolio.We have used the support confidence framework for generating association rules. The use of traditional ARM is infeasible because the number of association rules is exponential and finding relevant rules from this set is difficult. Therefore ARM techniques have been augmented with domain specific techniques like formation of thematical sectors, use of cross-sector and intra-sector rules to overcome the disadvantages of traditional ARM.We have implemented novel methods like using fuzzy logic and the concept of time lags to generate datasets from actual data of stock prices.Thorough experimentation has been performed on a variety of datasets like the BSE-30 sensitive Index, the S&P CNX Nifty or NSE-50, S&P CNX-100 and DOW-30 Industrial Average. We have compared the returns of our recommender system with the returns obtained from the top-5 mutual funds in India. The results of our system have surpassed the results from the mutual funds for all the datasets.Our approach demonstrates the application of soft computing techniques like ARM and fuzzy classification in the design of recommender systems.     

A novel stock recommendation system using Guba sentiment analysis

Investment recommendation has been one of the hottest topics in the finance area which can help investors to get more profits and to avoid loss. Existing recommendation systems mostly depend on analysis of trading data and company profit prediction. Though many works show that there is a positive correlation between investors’ sentiment and the finance market trends, few recommendation theories have been built based on sentiment. The primary reason is the difficulty to measure investors’ sentiment. In this work, a novel stock recommendation system is developed based on a proposed theory concerning the correlation between Guba-based sentiment of the retail investors and the stock market trends in China. To verify four hypotheses of the theory, a novel method is proposed to measure the investors’ sentiment by exploiting the large volumes of emotion enriched texts posted in Guba, which is online social platform for individual investors to share news and opinions concerning their favorite stocks. Results show the correctness of the proposed theory: (1) there is a positive correlation between Guba-based sentiment and the stock market trends; 2) the higher the post volumes and agreement, more proficiency the bullishness would be; and (3) a long-lasting negative Guba-based sentiment indicates the arrival of the bear market. The proposed recommendation system consists of three criteria accordingly to ensure the portfolio to meet requirements of the theory. Finally, experiments are implemented using the real data of Chinese stock market from March 2009 to March 2016 and the results show the effectiveness of the proposed system in recommending lucrative stocks and the theoretical cumulate profit is about eight times of the CSI300 in the period.     

The role of algorithmic trading systems on stock market efficiency

The rapid development of information technology has changed the dynamics of financial markets. The main purpose of this study is laid on examining the role of IT based stock trading on financial market efficiency. This research specifically focused on algorithmic trading. Algorithmic trading enables investors to trade stocks through a computer program without the need for human interventions. Based on an empirical analysis of the Korean stock market, this study discovered the positive impact of algorithmic trading on stock market efficiency at three-fold. First, the study results indicate that algorithmic trading contributes to the reduction in asymmetric volatility, which causes inefficiency of information in a stock market. Second, an algorithmic trading also increases the operation efficiency of a stock market. Arbitrage trading contributes on the equilibrium between the spot market and futures market as well as on the price discovery. Third, algorithmic trading provides liquidity for market participants contributing to friction free transactions. The research results indicate that stock exchanges based on electronic communications networks (ECNs) without human intervention could augment a financial market quality by increasing trading share volumes and market efficiency so that it can eventually contribute to the welfare of market investors.     

基于遗传编程的中国股票市场有效性检验

现代资本市场理论与金融投资实践之间存在着有效市场假说与技术分析之间的矛盾,使用流行的技术交易规则检验股票市场有效性可能导致两种结论偏差。遗传编程使用树形结构表示问题的候选解,可以很好地描述技术交易规则。利用遗传编程算法生成一种技术交易策略,并用其检验上证综合指数和5个沪深股市个股。回测结果表明,提出的方法相对于“买入-持有”策略能够获得超额收益,并且优于常用的流行技术指标,也说明我国股票市场并未达到弱式有效。     

A hybrid evolutionary dynamic neural network for stock market trend analysis and prediction using unscented Kalman filter

Stock market prediction is of great interest to stock traders and investors due to high profit in trading the stocks. A successful stock buying/selling generally occurs near price trend turning point. Thus the prediction of stock market indices and its analysis are important to ascertain whether the next day's closing price would increase or decrease. This paper, therefore, presents a simple IIR filter based dynamic neural network (DNN) and an innovative optimized adaptive unscented Kalman filter for forecasting stock price indices of four different Indian stocks, namely the Bombay stock exchange (BSE), the IBM stock market, RIL stock market, and Oracle stock market. The weights of the dynamic neural information system are adjusted by four different learning strategies that include gradient calculation, unscented Kalman filter (UKF), differential evolution (DE), and a hybrid technique (DEUKF) by alternately executing the DE and UKF for a few generations. To improve the performance of both the UKF and DE algorithms, adaptation of certain parameters in both these algorithms has been presented in this paper. After predicting the stock price indices one day to one week ahead time horizon, the stock market trend has been analyzed using several important technical indicators like the moving average (MA), stochastic oscillators like K and D parameters, WMS%R (William indicator), etc. Extensive computer simulations are carried out with the four learning strategies for prediction of stock indices and the up or down trends of the indices. From the results it is observed that significant accuracy is achieved using the hybrid DEUKF algorithm in comparison to others that include only DE, UKF, and gradient descent technique in chronological order. Comparisons with some of the widely used neural networks (NNs) are also presented in the paper.     

A genetic network programming with learning approach for enhanced stock trading model

In this paper, an enhancement of stock trading model using Genetic Network Programming (GNP) with Sarsa Learning is described. There are three important points in this paper: First, we use GNP with Sarsa Learning as the basic algorithm while both Technical Indices and Candlestick Charts are introduced for efficient stock trading decision-making. In order to create more efficient judgment functions to judge the current stock price appropriately, Importance Index (IMX) has been proposed to tell GNP the timing of buying and selling stocks. Second, to improve the performance of the proposed GNP-Sarsa algorithm, we proposed a new method that can learn the appropriate function describing the relation between the value of each technical index and the value of the IMX. This is an important point that devotes to the enhancement of the GNP-Sarsa algorithm. The third point is that in order to create more efficient judgment functions, sub-nodes are introduced in each node to select appropriate stock price information depending on the situations and to determine appropriate actions (buying/selling). To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, we carried out the simulation and compared the results of GNP-Sarsa with other methods like GNP with Actor Critic, GNP with Candlestick Chart, GA and Buy&Hold method. The results shows that the stock trading model using GNP-Sarsa outperforms all the other methods.     

Short term stock selection with case-based reasoning technique

Stock selection is an important decision making problem. Trading strategies and rules based on fundamental and technical analysis can be used for decision making process. In this paper, we propose an intelligent stock selection method, which is called case-based reasoning (CBR). This technique uses the fundamental and technical indicators to identify the winning stocks around the earning announcements. CBR method is compared with other artificial intelligence techniques such as multi layer perceptron (MLP), decision trees (QUEST, Classification and Regression Trees, C5), generalized rule induction (GRI) and logistic regression. We show that the performance of CBR is better than the performance of other techniques in terms of classification accuracy, average return, Sharpe ratio and ideal profit.     

An artificial stock market

The Santa Fe Artificial Stock Market consists of a central computational market and a number of artificially intelligent agents. The agents choose between investing in a stock and leaving their money in the bank, which pays a fixed interest rate. The stock pays a stochastic dividend and has a price which fluctuates according to agent demand. The agents make their investment decisions by attempting to forecast the future return on the stock, using genetic algorithms to generate, test, and evolve predictive rules. The artificial market shows two distinct regimes of behavior, depending on parameter settings and initial conditions. One regime corresponds to the theoretically predicted rational expectations behavior, with low overall trading volume, uncorrelated price series, and no possibility of technical trading. The other regime is more complex, and corresponds to realistic market behavior, with high trading volume, high intermittent volatility (including GARCH behavior), bubbles and crashes, and the presence of technical trading. One parameter that can be used to control the regime is the exploration rate, which governs how rapidly the agents explore new hypotheses with their genetic algorithms. At a low exploration rate the market settles into the rational expectations equilibrium. At a high exploration rate it falls into the more realistic complex regime. The transition is fairly sharp, but close to the boundary the outcome depends on the agents’ initial “beliefs”—if they believe in rational expectations they occur and are a local attractor; otherwise the market evolves into the complex regime. This work was presented, in part, at the Third International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 19–21, 1998     

An intelligent short term stock trading fuzzy system for assisting investors in portfolio management

Financial markets are complex systems influenced by many interrelated economic, political and psychological factors and characterised by inherent nonlinearities. Recently, there have been many efforts towards stock market prediction, applying various fuzzy logic techniques and using technical analysis methods.This paper presents a short term trading fuzzy system using a novel trading strategy and an “amalgam” between altered commonly used technical indicators and rarely used ones, in order to assist investors in their portfolio management. The sample consists of daily data from the general index of the Athens Stock Exchange over a period of more than 15 years (15/11/1996 to 5/6/2012), which was also divided into distinctive groups of bull and bear market periods.The results suggest that, with or without taking into consideration transaction costs, the return of the proposed fuzzy model is superior to the returns of the buy and hold strategy. Τhe proposed system can be characterised as conservative, since it produces smaller losses during bear market periods and smaller gains during bull market periods compared with the buy and hold strategy.     

Adaptive stock trading with dynamic asset allocation using reinforcement learning

Stock trading is an important decision-making problem that involves both stock selection and asset management. Though many promising results have been reported for predicting prices, selecting stocks, and managing assets using machine-learning techniques, considering all of them is challenging because of their complexity. In this paper, we present a new stock trading method that incorporates dynamic asset allocation in a reinforcement-learning framework. The proposed asset allocation strategy, called meta policy (MP), is designed to utilize the temporal information from both stock recommendations and the ratio of the stock fund over the asset. Local traders are constructed with pattern-based multiple predictors, and used to decide the purchase money per recommendation. Formulating the MP in the reinforcement learning framework is achieved by a compact design of the environment and the learning agent. Experimental results using the Korean stock market show that the proposed MP method outperforms other fixed asset-allocation strategies, and reduces the risks inherent in local traders.     

Clustering stock price time series data to generate stock trading recommendations: An empirical study

Predicting the stock market is considered to be a very difficult task due to its non-linear and dynamic nature. Our proposed system is designed in such a way that even a layman can use it. It reduces the burden on the user. The user's job is to give only the recent closing prices of a stock as input and the proposed Recommender system will instruct him when to buy and when to sell if it is profitable or not to buy share in case if it is not profitable to do trading. Using soft computing based techniques is considered to be more suitable for predicting trends in stock market where the data is chaotic and large in number. The soft computing based systems are capable of extracting relevant information from large sets of data by discovering hidden patterns in the data. Here regression trees are used for dimensionality reduction and clustering is done with the help of Self Organizing Maps (SOM). The proposed system is designed to assist stock market investors identify possible profit-making opportunities and also help in developing a better understanding on how to extract the relevant information from stock price data.