Testing and Tuning Market Trading Systems

Testing and Tuning Market Trading Systems
Author: Timothy Masters
Publisher: Apress
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2018-10-26
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1484241738

Build, test, and tune financial, insurance or other market trading systems using C++ algorithms and statistics. You’ve had an idea and have done some preliminary experiments, and it looks promising. Where do you go from here? Well, this book discusses and dissects this case study approach. Seemingly good backtest performance isn't enough to justify trading real money. You need to perform rigorous statistical tests of the system's validity. Then, if basic tests confirm the quality of your idea, you need to tune your system, not just for best performance, but also for robust behavior in the face of inevitable market changes. Next, you need to quantify its expected future behavior, assessing how bad its real-life performance might actually be, and whether you can live with that. Finally, you need to find its theoretical performance limits so you know if its actual trades conform to this theoretical expectation, enabling you to dump the system if it does not live up to expectations. This book does not contain any sure-fire, guaranteed-riches trading systems. Those are a dime a dozen... But if you have a trading system, this book will provide you with a set of tools that will help you evaluate the potential value of your system, tweak it to improve its profitability, and monitor its on-going performance to detect deterioration before it fails catastrophically. Any serious market trader would do well to employ the methods described in this book. What You Will Learn See how the 'spaghetti-on-the-wall' approach to trading system development can be done legitimatelyDetect overfitting early in developmentEstimate the probability that your system's backtest results could have been due to just good luckRegularize a predictive model so it automatically selects an optimal subset of indicator candidatesRapidly find the global optimum for any type of parameterized trading systemAssess the ruggedness of your trading system against market changesEnhance the stationarity and information content of your proprietary indicatorsNest one layer of walkforward analysis inside another layer to account for selection bias in complex trading systemsCompute a lower bound on your system's mean future performanceBound expected periodic returns to detect on-going system deterioration before it becomes severeEstimate the probability of catastrophic drawdown Who This Book Is For Experienced C++ programmers, developers, and software engineers. Prior experience with rigorous statistical procedures to evaluate and maximize the quality of systems is recommended as well.

Permutation and Randomization Tests for Trading System Development

Permutation and Randomization Tests for Trading System Development
Author: Timothy Masters
Publisher:
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2020-02-12
Genre:
ISBN:

This book provides the trading system developer with a powerful set of statistical tools for measuring vital aspects of performance that are ignored by most developers. All algorithms include intuitive justification, basic theory, all relevant equations, and highly commented C++ code for complete programs that run in a Windows Command Console. Reprogramming them in other languages should be easy, given the detailed explanations of each algorithm. The following topics are covered: Testing for overfitting at the earliest possible stage Evaluating the luckiness-versus-skill of a fully developed system before deploying it Testing the effectiveness and reliability of a trading system factory Removing selection bias when screening a large number of indicators Probability bounds for future mean returns Bounding typical and catastrophic future drawdowns Is the best indicator or model in a competition truly the best, or just the luckiest? Which markets provide truly superior profits for your trading system? What holding time for your system provides the best risk/return performance?

Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading

Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading
Author: Stefan Jansen
Publisher: Packt Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 822
Release: 2020-07-31
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1839216786

Leverage machine learning to design and back-test automated trading strategies for real-world markets using pandas, TA-Lib, scikit-learn, LightGBM, SpaCy, Gensim, TensorFlow 2, Zipline, backtrader, Alphalens, and pyfolio. Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free eBook in the PDF format. Key FeaturesDesign, train, and evaluate machine learning algorithms that underpin automated trading strategiesCreate a research and strategy development process to apply predictive modeling to trading decisionsLeverage NLP and deep learning to extract tradeable signals from market and alternative dataBook Description The explosive growth of digital data has boosted the demand for expertise in trading strategies that use machine learning (ML). This revised and expanded second edition enables you to build and evaluate sophisticated supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning models. This book introduces end-to-end machine learning for the trading workflow, from the idea and feature engineering to model optimization, strategy design, and backtesting. It illustrates this by using examples ranging from linear models and tree-based ensembles to deep-learning techniques from cutting edge research. This edition shows how to work with market, fundamental, and alternative data, such as tick data, minute and daily bars, SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, financial news, or satellite images to generate tradeable signals. It illustrates how to engineer financial features or alpha factors that enable an ML model to predict returns from price data for US and international stocks and ETFs. It also shows how to assess the signal content of new features using Alphalens and SHAP values and includes a new appendix with over one hundred alpha factor examples. By the end, you will be proficient in translating ML model predictions into a trading strategy that operates at daily or intraday horizons, and in evaluating its performance. What you will learnLeverage market, fundamental, and alternative text and image dataResearch and evaluate alpha factors using statistics, Alphalens, and SHAP valuesImplement machine learning techniques to solve investment and trading problemsBacktest and evaluate trading strategies based on machine learning using Zipline and BacktraderOptimize portfolio risk and performance analysis using pandas, NumPy, and pyfolioCreate a pairs trading strategy based on cointegration for US equities and ETFsTrain a gradient boosting model to predict intraday returns using AlgoSeek's high-quality trades and quotes dataWho this book is for If you are a data analyst, data scientist, Python developer, investment analyst, or portfolio manager interested in getting hands-on machine learning knowledge for trading, this book is for you. This book is for you if you want to learn how to extract value from a diverse set of data sources using machine learning to design your own systematic trading strategies. Some understanding of Python and machine learning techniques is required.

The Evaluation and Optimization of Trading Strategies

The Evaluation and Optimization of Trading Strategies
Author: Robert Pardo
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2011-01-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 111804505X

A newly expanded and updated edition of the trading classic, Design, Testing, and Optimization of Trading Systems Trading systems expert Robert Pardo is back, and in The Evaluation and Optimization of Trading Strategies, a thoroughly revised and updated edition of his classic text Design, Testing, and Optimization of Trading Systems, he reveals how he has perfected the programming and testing of trading systems using a successful battery of his own time-proven techniques. With this book, Pardo delivers important information to readers, from the design of workable trading strategies to measuring issues like profit and risk. Written in a straightforward and accessible style, this detailed guide presents traders with a way to develop and verify their trading strategy no matter what form they are currently using–stochastics, moving averages, chart patterns, RSI, or breakout methods. Whether a trader is seeking to enhance their profit or just getting started in testing, The Evaluation and Optimization of Trading Strategies offers practical instruction and expert advice on the development, evaluation, and application of winning mechanical trading systems.

Statistically Sound Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading of Financial Instruments

Statistically Sound Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading of Financial Instruments
Author: David Aronson
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Algorithmus
ISBN: 9781489507716

This book serves two purposes. First, it teaches the importance of using sophisticated yet accessible statistical methods to evaluate a trading system before it is put to real-world use. In order to accommodate readers having limited mathematical background, these techniques are illustrated with step-by-step examples using actual market data, and all examples are explained in plain language. Second, this book shows how the free program TSSB (Trading System Synthesis & Boosting) can be used to develop and test trading systems. The machine learning and statistical algorithms available in TSSB go far beyond those available in other off-the-shelf development software. Intelligent use of these state-of-the-art techniques greatly improves the likelihood of obtaining a trading system whose impressive backtest results continue when the system is put to use in a trading account. Among other things, this book will teach the reader how to: Estimate future performance with rigorous algorithms Evaluate the influence of good luck in backtests Detect overfitting before deploying your system Estimate performance bias due to model fitting and selection of seemingly superior systems Use state-of-the-art ensembles of models to form consensus trade decisions Build optimal portfolios of trading systems and rigorously test their expected performance Search thousands of markets to find subsets that are especially predictable Create trading systems that specialize in specific market regimes such as trending/flat or high/low volatility More information on the TSSB program can be found at TSSBsoftware dot com.

Trade with the Odds

Trade with the Odds
Author: Anthony Trongone
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2012-11-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1118239415

Hands-on tools to identify and profit from the market's recent patterns Trading is all about managing probabilities. In Trading with the Odds, Anthony Trongone explains that the quest for developing a perfect system, which drives most traders, is fruitless. Instead, traders should focus on developing the analytic and trading skills necessary to stay in tune with the constant evolution of the financial markets. In this book, Trongone emphasizes the importance of testing and monitoring trading strategies and raw market data as a means of developing an edge over other traders who are unwilling to get their hands dirty and dig into the data on a continuing basis. Importantly, he shows that Excel, a program almost all traders are familiar with, can be utilized to measure virtually every important aspect of trading system performance and to search for tradable market patterns. In addition, the book includes several applications that will allow you to calculate current market conditions and market patterns based on time of day, intermarket relationships, and other factors. Advocates an analytical approach which evolves in concert with changing market conditions Explains why it's hard to make money from off-the-shelf systems and indicators Provides in-depth analysis of other major industries generating worthwhile IPOs Includes applications that allow users to calculate recent market patterns Underlying Trongone's approach is the conviction that traders must constantly innovate in response to the market, and those that rely on static analysis, will fail to achieve the results they expect.

Cybernetic Analysis for Stocks and Futures

Cybernetic Analysis for Stocks and Futures
Author: John F. Ehlers
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2011-01-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1118045726

Cutting-edge insight from the leader in trading technology In Cybernetic Analysis for Stocks and Futures, noted technical analyst John Ehlers continues to enlighten readers on the art of predicting the market based on tested systems. With application of his engineering expertise, Ehlers explains the latest, most advanced techniques that help traders predict stock and futures markets with surgical precision. Unique new indicators and automatic trading systems are described in text as well as Easy Language and EFS code. The approaches are universal and robust enough to be applied to a full range of market conditions. John F. Ehlers (Santa Barbara, CA) is President of MESA Software (www.mesasoftware.com) and has also written Rocket Science for Traders (0-471-40567-1) as well as numerous articles for Futures and Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities magazines.

Detecting Regime Change in Computational Finance

Detecting Regime Change in Computational Finance
Author: Jun Chen
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2020-09-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000220168

Based on interdisciplinary research into "Directional Change", a new data-driven approach to financial data analysis, Detecting Regime Change in Computational Finance: Data Science, Machine Learning and Algorithmic Trading applies machine learning to financial market monitoring and algorithmic trading. Directional Change is a new way of summarising price changes in the market. Instead of sampling prices at fixed intervals (such as daily closing in time series), it samples prices when the market changes direction ("zigzags"). By sampling data in a different way, this book lays out concepts which enable the extraction of information that other market participants may not be able to see. The book includes a Foreword by Richard Olsen and explores the following topics: Data science: as an alternative to time series, price movements in a market can be summarised as directional changes Machine learning for regime change detection: historical regime changes in a market can be discovered by a Hidden Markov Model Regime characterisation: normal and abnormal regimes in historical data can be characterised using indicators defined under Directional Change Market Monitoring: by using historical characteristics of normal and abnormal regimes, one can monitor the market to detect whether the market regime has changed Algorithmic trading: regime tracking information can help us to design trading algorithms It will be of great interest to researchers in computational finance, machine learning and data science. About the Authors Jun Chen received his PhD in computational finance from the Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents, University of Essex in 2019. Edward P K Tsang is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Essex, where he co-founded the Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents in 2002.

Trading Options For Dummies

Trading Options For Dummies
Author: Joe Duarte
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2015-02-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1118982649

Navigate options markets and bring in the profits Thinking about trading options, but not sure where to start? This new edition of Trading Options For Dummies starts you at the beginning, explaining the common types of options available for trading and helps you choose the right ones for your investing needs. You'll find out how to weigh option costs and benefits, combine options to reduce risk, build a strategy that allows you to gain no matter the market conditions, broaden your retirement portfolio with index, equity, and ETF options, and so much more. Options are contracts giving the purchaser the right to buy or sell a security, such as stocks, at a fixed price within a specific period of time. Because options cost less than stock, they are a versatile trading instrument, while providing a high leverage approach to trading that can limit the overall risk of a trade or provide additional income. If you're an investor with some general knowledge of trading but want a better understanding of risk factors, new techniques, and an overall improved profit outcome, Trading Options For Dummies is for you. Helps you determine and manage your risk, guard your assets using options, protect your rights, and satisfy your contract obligations Provides expert insight on combining options to limit your position risk Offers step-by-step instruction on ways to capitalize on sideways movements Covers what you need to know about options contract specifications and mechanics Trading options can be a great way to manage your risk, and this hands-on, friendly guide gives you the trusted and expert help you need to succeed.

Modern Data Mining Algorithms in C++ and CUDA C

Modern Data Mining Algorithms in C++ and CUDA C
Author: Timothy Masters
Publisher: Apress
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2020-06-05
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1484259882

Discover a variety of data-mining algorithms that are useful for selecting small sets of important features from among unwieldy masses of candidates, or extracting useful features from measured variables. As a serious data miner you will often be faced with thousands of candidate features for your prediction or classification application, with most of the features being of little or no value. You’ll know that many of these features may be useful only in combination with certain other features while being practically worthless alone or in combination with most others. Some features may have enormous predictive power, but only within a small, specialized area of the feature space. The problems that plague modern data miners are endless. This book helps you solve this problem by presenting modern feature selection techniques and the code to implement them. Some of these techniques are: Forward selection component analysis Local feature selection Linking features and a target with a hidden Markov modelImprovements on traditional stepwise selectionNominal-to-ordinal conversion All algorithms are intuitively justified and supported by the relevant equations and explanatory material. The author also presents and explains complete, highly commented source code. The example code is in C++ and CUDA C but Python or other code can be substituted; the algorithm is important, not the code that's used to write it. What You Will Learn Combine principal component analysis with forward and backward stepwise selection to identify a compact subset of a large collection of variables that captures the maximum possible variation within the entire set. Identify features that may have predictive power over only a small subset of the feature domain. Such features can be profitably used by modern predictive models but may be missed by other feature selection methods. Find an underlying hidden Markov model that controls the distributions of feature variables and the target simultaneously. The memory inherent in this method is especially valuable in high-noise applications such as prediction of financial markets.Improve traditional stepwise selection in three ways: examine a collection of 'best-so-far' feature sets; test candidate features for inclusion with cross validation to automatically and effectively limit model complexity; and at each step estimate the probability that our results so far could be just the product of random good luck. We also estimate the probability that the improvement obtained by adding a new variable could have been just good luck. Take a potentially valuable nominal variable (a category or class membership) that is unsuitable for input to a prediction model, and assign to each category a sensible numeric value that can be used as a model input. Who This Book Is For Intermediate to advanced data science programmers and analysts.