Machine learning-based probabilistic profitable model in algorithmic trading

Machine learning models are nowadays becoming ubiquitous in algorithmic trading and investment management. These models are mostly used in the pre-trade analysis phase to determine the buy or sell decisions using various machine learning techniques. We aim to implement a machine learning-driven approach using various technical indicators to predict stock market prices and then accordingly make a decision about buying or selling. First, an effective trading strategy is discussed that selects the potentially profitable stocks, and then the technical indicators such as simple moving average (SMA), exponential moving average (EMA), relative strength index (RSI), and moving average convergence divergence (MACD) are calculated for those potentially profitable stocks. Then supervised machine learning algorithms such as multiple linear regression, support vector machine regression, and decision tree regression are applied, where the close price of the stock is predicted using technical indicators for the next day, and based on that buy or sell signals are generated. The model is then tested on 12 different SNP500 stocks, one for every month in 2018, with the mean squared error (MSE) varying between 30.33 and 48.16 and the root MSE varying between 5.51 and 6.93, where the error is calculated on the difference in the number of days when the stock price actually increases and the predicted number of days for various models.