Updates: 2019: In this first Machine Learning for Trading post, we’ve added a section on feature selection using the Boruta package, equity curves of a simple trading system, and some Lite-C code that generates the training data. 2020: I’ve updated the original post with some new thinking about data-mining, refreshed the code, updated the data and …
Recently, I wrote about fitting mean-reversion time series analysis models to financial data and using the models’ predictions as the basis of a trading strategy. Continuing our exploration of time series modelling, let’s research the autoregressive and conditionally heteroskedastic family of time series models. In particular, we want to understand the autoregressive integrated moving average …
In the first Mean Reversion and Cointegration post, I explored mean reversion of individual financial time series using techniques such as the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test, the Hurst exponent and the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck equation for a mean reverting stochastic process. I also presented a simple linear mean reversion strategy as a proof of concept. In this post, I’ll …
This series of posts is inspired by several chapters from Ernie Chan’s highly recommended book Algorithmic Trading. The book follows Ernie’s first contribution, Quantitative Trading, and focuses on testing and implementing a number of strategies that exploit measurable market inefficiencies. I’m a big fan of Ernie’s work and have used his material as inspiration for a great deal …
Important preface: This post is in no way intended to showcase a particular trading strategy. It is purely to share and demonstrate the use of the framework I’ve put together to speed the research and development process for a particular type of trading strategy. Comments and critiques regarding the framework and the methodology used are most …
In the last article, I described an application of the k-means clustering algorithm for classifying candlesticks based on the relative position of their open, high, low and close. This was a simple enough exercise, but now I tackle something more challenging: isolating information that is both useful and practical to real trading. I’ll initially try two …
Candlestick patterns were used to trade the rice market in Japan back in the 1800’s. Steve Nison popularised the idea in the western world and claims that the technique, which is based on the premise that the appearance of certain patterns portend the future direction of the market, is applicable to modern financial markets. Today, …
This post builds on work done by jcl over at his blog, The Financial Hacker. He proposes the Cold Blood Index as a means of objectively deciding whether to continue trading a system through a drawdown. I was recently looking for a solution like this and actually settled on a modification of jcl’s second example, where an allowance …
In the first part of this article, I described a procedure for empirically testing whether a trading strategy has predictive power by comparing its performance to the distribution of the performance of a large number of random strategies with similar trade distributions. In this post, I will present the results of the simple example described …
Picture this: A developer has coded up a brilliant strategy, taking great care not to over-optimize. There is no look-ahead bias and the developer has accounted for data-mining bias. The out of sample backtest looks great. Is it time to go live? I would’ve said yes, until I read Ernie Chan’s Algorithmic Trading and realised …
