Two Stock-Trading Agents: Market Making and Technical Analysis

Evolving information technologies have brought computational power and real-time facilities into the stock market. Automated stock trading draws much interest from both the elds of computer science and of business, since it promises to provide superior ability in a trading market to any individual trader. Trading strategies have been proposed and practiced from the perspectives of Arti cial Intelligence, market making, external information feedback, and technical analysis among others. This paper examines two automated stock-trading agents in the context of the Penn-Lehman Automated Trading (PLAT) simulator [1], which is a real-time, real-data market simulator. The rst agent devises a market-making strategy exploiting market volatility without predicting the exact direction of the stock price movement. The second agent uses technical analysis. It might seem natural to buy when the market is on the rise and sell when it's on the decline, but the second agent does exactly the opposite. As a result, we call it the reverse strategy