The theory of quantitative trading

In this article we briefly present our contributions toward Trading Agent Competition (TAC); an international forum for promotion of research into the trading agent problems. Moreover, we present some strategies proposed and used in the development of our TAC Agent and resultant brief information after its participation in a real time trading environment. In the end we conclude with needed improvements and future recommendations.

The goal of this paper is to debunk and dispel the magic behind the black-box quantitative strategies. It aims to build a solid foundation on how and why the techniques work. This manuscript crystallizes this knowledge by deriving from simple intuitions, the mathematics behind the strategies. This tutorial doesn't shy away from addressing both the formal and informal aspects of quantitative strategies. By doing so, it hopes to provide readers with a deeper understanding of th...

We outline the idiosyncrasies of neural information processing and machine learning in quantitative finance. We also present some of the approaches we take towards solving the fundamental challenges we face.

A general framework is suggested to describe human decision making in a certain class of experiments performed in a trading laboratory. We are in particular interested in discerning between two different moods, or states of the investors, corresponding to investors using fundamental investment strategies, technical analysis investment strategies respectively. Our framework accounts for two opposite situations already encountered in experimental setups: i) the rational expecta...

This is a short review of the background and recent development in quantum game theory and its possible application in economics and finance. The intersection of science and society is discussed and Quantum Anthropic Principle is put forward. The review is addressed to non-specialists.

The successes of Artificial Intelligence in recent years in areas such as image analysis, natural language understanding and strategy games have sparked interest from the world of finance. Specifically, there are high expectations, and ongoing engineering projects, regarding the creation of artificial agents, known as robotic traders, capable of juggling the financial markets with the skill of experienced human traders. Obvious economic implications aside, this is certainly a...

A deterministic trading strategy can be regarded as a signal processing element that uses external information and past prices as inputs and incorporates them into future prices. This paper uses a market maker based method of price formation to study the price dynamics induced by several commonly used financial trading strategies, showing how they amplify noise, induce structure in prices, and cause phenomena such as excess and clustered volatility.

We postulates, and then show experimentally, that liquidity deficit is the driving force of the markets. In the first part of the paper a kinematic of liquidity deficit is developed. The calculus-like approach, which is based on Radon--Nikodym derivatives and their generalization, allows us to calculate important characteristics of observable market dynamics. In the second part of the paper this calculus is used in an attempt to build a dynamic equation in the form: future pr...

This article is a prologue to the article "Why Markets are Inefficient: A Gambling 'Theory' of Financial Markets for Practitioners and Theorists." It presents important background for that article --- why gambling is important, even necessary, for real-world traders --- the reason for the superiority of the strategic/gambling approach to the competing market ideologies of market fundamentalism and the scientific approach --- and its potential to uncover profitable trading sys...

The price fluctuations in the financial markets are the result of the individual operations by many individual investors. However for many decades the finacial theory did not use directly this "microscopic representation". The difficulties preventing it were multiple but the main two are being solved recently with the advent of modern computer technology: - massive detailed data on the individual market operations became available. - "microscopic simulations" of the stock...