Evaluating the performance of adapting trading strategies with different memory lengths

The unprecedented access offered by the World Wide Web brings with it the potential to gather huge amounts of data on human activities. Here we exploit this by using a toy model of financial markets, the Minority Game (MG), to investigate human speculative trading behaviour and information capacity. Hundreds of individuals have played a total of tens of thousands of game turns against computer-controlled agents in the Web-based_Interactive Minority Game_. The analytical under...

Strategy evaluation schemes are a crucial factor in any agent-based market model, as they determine the agents' strategy preferences and consequently their behavioral pattern. This study investigates how the strategy evaluation schemes adopted by agents affect their performance in conjunction with the market circumstances. We observe the performance of three strategy evaluation schemes, the history-dependent wealth game, the trend-opposing minority game, and the trend-followi...

We present a deep long short-term memory (LSTM)-based neural network for predicting asset prices, together with a successful trading strategy for generating profits based on the model's predictions. Our work is motivated by the fact that the effectiveness of any prediction model is inherently coupled to the trading strategy it is used with, and vise versa. This highlights the difficulty in developing models and strategies which are jointly optimal, but also points to avenues ...

We explore various extensions of Challet and Zhang's Minority Game in an attempt to gain insight into the dynamics underlying financial markets. First we consider a heterogeneous population where individual traders employ differing `time horizons' when making predictions based on historical data. The resulting average winnings per trader is a highly non-linear function of the population's composition. Second, we introduce a threshold confidence level among traders below which...

Price dynamics is analyzed in terms of a model which includes the possibility of effective forces due to trend followers or trend adverse strategies. The method is tested on the data of a minority-majority model and indeed it is capable of reconstructing the prevailing traders' strategies in a given time interval. Then we also analyze real (NYSE) stock-prices dynamics and it is possible to derive an indication for the the ``sentiment'' of the market for time intervals of at l...

We report on a technique based on multi-agent games which has potential use in the prediction of future movements of financial time-series. A third-party game is trained on a black-box time-series, and is then run into the future to extract next-step and multi-step predictions. In addition to the possibility of identifying profit opportunities, the technique may prove useful in the development of improved risk management strategies.

We consider a simple binary market model containing $N$ competitive agents. The novel feature of our model is that it incorporates the tendency shown by traders to look for patterns in past price movements over multiple time scales, i.e. {\em multiple memory-lengths}. In the regime where these memory-lengths are all small, the average winnings per agent exceed those obtained for either (1) a pure population where all agents have equal memory-length, or (2) a mixed population ...

A new simple model of financial market is proposed, based on the sequential and inter-temporal nature of trader-trader interaction, and on a new simple trading strategy space. In this pattern-based speculation model, the traders open and close their positions explicitly. Information ecology is strikingly similar to that of the Minority Game which suggest to reinterpret the latter as a model of synchronisation of predictability exploitation. Naive and sophisticated agents are ...

A brief review is given of the minority game, an idealized model of a market of speculative agents, and its complex many-body behaviour. Particular consideration is given to the consequences and implications of correlations between stategies and different frequencies and timings of adaptation.

It is a common misconception that in order to make consistent profits as a trader, one needs to posses some extra information leading to an asset value estimation more accurate than that reflected by the current market price. While the idea makes intuitive sense and is also well substantiated by the widely popular Kelly criterion, we prove that it is generally possible to make systematic profits with a completely inferior price-predicting model. The key idea is to alter the t...