Forex Trading Signal Extraction with Deep Learning Models

The rise of AI technology has popularized deep learning models for financial trading prediction, promising substantial profits with minimal risk. Institutions like Westpac, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Macquarie Bank, and Bloomberg invest heavily in this transformative technology. Researchers have also explored AI's potential in the exchange rate market. This thesis focuses on developing advanced deep learning models for accurate forex market prediction and AI-powered trading strategies. Three deep learning models are introduced: an event-driven LSTM model, an Attention-based VGG16 model named MHATTN-VGG16, and a pre-trained model called TradingBERT. These models aim to enhance signal extraction and price forecasting in forex trading, offering valuable insights for decision-making. The first model, an LSTM, predicts retracement points crucial for identifying trend reversals. It outperforms baseline models like GRU and RNN, thanks to noise reduction in the training data. Experiments determine the optimal number of timesteps for trend identification, showing promise for building a robotic trading platform. The second model, MHATTN-VGG16, predicts maximum and minimum price movements in forex chart images. It combines VGG16 with multi-head attention and positional encoding to effectively classify financial chart images. The third model utilizes a pre-trained BERT architecture to transform trading price data into normalized embeddings, enabling meaningful signal extraction from financial data. This study pioneers the use of pre-trained models in financial trading and introduces a method for converting continuous price data into categorized elements, leveraging the success of BERT. This thesis contributes innovative approaches to deep learning in algorithmic trading, offering traders and investors precision and confidence in navigating financial markets

Data Mining in Financial Domain

For this project, we explored the use of text mining, clustering, and machine learning models to develop a system that combines technical and sentiment analysis to determine the movement of a stock. The final result of our project is a system comprised of a novel sentiment analysis used as input for the larger recurrent neural networks, each trained on a cluster of stocks from the S&P 100. Experimental results show that our system can predict upward movements in stock price over a 65-minute period with up to 77% accuracy for a specific cluster compared to 52% of randomly guessing for the same cluster

Machine Learning Methods to Exploit the Predictive Power of Open, High, Low, Close (OHLC) Data

Novel machine learning techniques are developed for the prediction of financial markets, with a combination of supervised, unsupervised and Bayesian optimisation machine learning methods shown able to give a predictive power rarely previously observed. A new data mining technique named Deep Candlestick Mining (DCM) is proposed that is able to discover highly predictive dataset specific candlestick patterns (arrangements of open, high, low, close (OHLC) aggregated price data structures) which significantly outperform traditional candlestick patterns. The power that OHLC features can provide is further investigated, using LSTM RNNs and XGBoost trees, in the prediction of a mid-price directional change, defined here as the mid-point between either the open and close or high and low of an OHLC bar. This target variable has been overlooked in the literature, which is surprising given the relative ease of predicting it, significantly in excess of noisier financial quantities. However, the true value of this quantity is only known upon the period's ending – i.e. it is an after-the-fact observation. To make use of and enhance the remarkable predictability of the mid-price directional change, multi-period predictions are investigated by training many LSTM RNNs (XGBoost trees being used to identify powerful OHLC input feature combinations), over different time horizons, to construct a Bayesian optimised trend prediction ensemble. This fusion of long-, medium- and short-term information results in a model capable of predicting market trend direction to greater than 70% better than random. A trading strategy is constructed to demonstrate how this predictive power can be used by exploiting an artefact of the LSTM RNN training process which allows the trading system to size and place trades in accordance with the ensemble's predictive certainty

Support Vector Machine for Predicting Candlestick Chart Movement on Foreign Exchange

Foreign Exchange, commonly called Forex, is a form of investment in the non-real sector in great demand. Forex is a marketplace that specializes in foreign exchange trading. Technology advancements have made it easy to monitor investment conditions in real time and present them in an easyto - understand graphical form. As a result, predictions are closely related to investment, starting from market sentiment and economic conditions to technical matters. One of the Artificial Intelligence methods that can be used in classifying is the Support Vector Machine (SVM). SVM is a machine learning classification method based on the Structural Risk Minimization (SRM) principle to find the best hyperplane that separates two classes in the input space that determines the classification decision function by minimizing empirical risk. This study used candlestick patterns to predict foreign exchange chart movements using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification method. The purpose of this study was to measure the accuracy of the Support Vector Machine method in making predictions using candlestick patterns so that it can assist traders in making decisions in forex trading. The accuracy level obtained from the data classification results reached 90.72% with a precision of 87.69%. With a relatively good level of accuracy, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) method can be used to predict chart movements in foreign exchange using candlesticks to indicate the current trend’s direction

Machine Learning-Driven Decision Making based on Financial Time Series

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Artificial Intelligence and Deep Reinforcement Learning Stock Market Predictions

Billions of dollars are traded automatically in the stock market every day, including algorithms that use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, but there are still questions regarding how AI trades successfully. The black box nature of these AI techniques, namely neural networks, gives pause to entrusting it with valuable trading funds. This dissertation applies AI techniques to stock market trading strategies, but it also provides exploratory research into how these techniques predict the stock market successfully. This dissertation presents the work of three research papers. The first paper presented in this dissertation applies a artificial intelligence technique, reinforcement learning, to candlestick pattern trading. This paper also analyzes how the DDQN trades, through the use of a more recent technique, feature map visualizations. The second and third paper analyze AI techniques in a pairs trading strategy. The first paper results show that the DDQN is able to outperform the S&P 500 Index returns. Results also show that the CNN is able to switch its attention from all the candles in a candlestick image to the more recent candles in the image, based on an event such as the coronavirus stock market crash of 2020.The second paper results show fuzzy logic applied to pairs trading strategy for 22 stock pairs, increases annual returns on average from 15% to 17%. The third paper results show a DDQN was able to accurately predict the spread of the Adobe/Red Hat pair, for positive returns. This dissertation shows that AI techniques are successful in predicting the stock market, but more importantly it provides research tools and methods to better understand and implement these techniques in stock market trading