Performance evaluation metric for statistical learning trading strategies

Abstract

We analyze how the sentiment of financial news can be used to predict stock returns and build profitable trading strategies. Combining the textual analysis of financial news headlines and statistical methods, we build multi-class classification models to predict the stock return. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we develop a performance evaluation metric to compare multi-class classification methods, taking into account the precision and accuracy of the models and methods. By maximizing the metric, we find optimal combinations of models and methods and select the best approach for prediction and decision-making. Secondly, this metric enables us to construct profitable option trading strategies, which can also be used as an assessment tool to analyze models' prediction power. We apply our methodology to historical data from Apple stock and financial news headlines from Reuters from January 1, 2012 to May 31, 2019. During validation (May 31, 2018, to May 31, 2019), our models consistently outperformed the market, with two-class one-stage models yielding returns between 30% and 45%, compared to the S & P500 index's 1.73% return over the same period.

Keywords

• statistical learning
• logistic regression
• sentiment analysis of financial news
• multi-class classification metrics
• option trading strategies