Building Market Timing Strategies Using Trend Representative Testing and Computational Intelligence Metaheuristics

Abstract

Market timing, one of the core challenges to design successful trading strategies, is concerned with deciding when to buy or sell an asset of interest on a financial market. Market timing strategies can be built by using a collection of components or functions that process market context and return a recommendation on the course of action to take. In this chapter, we revisit the work presented in [20] on the application of Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to the issue of market timing while using a novel approach for training and testing called Trend Representative Testing. We provide more details on the process of building trend representative datasets, as well as, introduce a new PSO variant with a different approach to pruning. Results show that the new pruning procedure is capable of reducing solution length while not adversely affecting the quality of the solutions in a statistically significant manner.