trading strategies

I recently read Gary Antonacci's book Dual Momentum Investing: An Innovative Strategy for Higher Returns with Lower Risk, and it was clear to me that this was an important book to share with the Robot Wealth community. It is important not only because it describes a simple approach to exploiting the "premier anomaly" (Fama and French, 2008), but because it is ultimately about approaching the markets with a critical, inquisitive mindset, while not taking oneself too seriously. I think we can all do with a dose of that sometimes. Gary's style is unique: this is the work of a free and critical thinker who is not afraid to question the status quo. While articulately drawing from a range of sources, from Shakespeare to Bacon and Einstein to Buffet (even Thomas Conrad's 1970 book Hedgemanship: How to Make Money in Bear Markets, Bull Markets and Chicken Markets While Confounding Professional Money Managers and Attracting a Better Class of Women, which has got to be the greatest title in the history of trading books), Gary comes across as playful and slightly eccentric (which is wonderfully refreshing...

Introduction My first post on using machine learning for financial prediction took an in-depth look at various feature selection methods as a data pre-processing step in the quest to mine financial data for profitable patterns. I looked at various methods to identify predictive features including Maximal Information Coefficient (MIC), Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), algorithms with built-in feature selection, selection via exhaustive search of possible generalized linear models, and the Boruta feature selection algorithm. I personally found the Boruta algorithm to be the most intuitive and elegant approach, but regardless of the method chosen, the same features seemed to keep on turning up in the results. In this post, I will take this analysis further and use these features to build predictive models that could form the basis of autonomous trading systems. Firstly, I'll provide an overview of the algorithms that I have found to generally perform well on this type of machine learning problem as well as those algorithms recommended by David Aronson (2013) in Statistically Sound Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading of Financial Instruments (SSML). I'll also discuss a framework for measuring the...

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 (ARIMA) and generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models. Why? Well, they are both referenced frequently in the quantitative finance literature, and it's about time I got up to speed so why not join me! What follows is a summary of what I learned about these models, a general fitting procedure and a simple trading strategy based on the forecasts of a fitted model. Let's get started! What are these time series analysis models? Several definitions are necessary to set the scene. I don't want to reproduce the theory I've been wading through; rather here is my very high-level summary of what I've learned about time series modelling, in particular, the ARIMA and GARCH models and how they are related to their component models: At its...

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 welcome. Backtest results presented are for illustrating the methodology and describing the outputs only. That done, on to the interesting stuff My last two posts (Part 1 here and Part 2 here) explored applying the k-means clustering algorithm for unsupervised discovery of candlestick patterns. The results were interesting enough (to me at least) to justify further research in this domain, but nothing presented thus far would be of much use in a standalone trading system. There are many possible directions in which this research could go. Some ideas that could be worth pursuing include: Providing the clustering algorithm with other data, such as trend or volatility information; Extending the search to include two- and three-day patterns; Varying the number of clusters; Searching across markets and asset...