Intraday trend prediction of stock indices with machine learning approaches

Abstract In recent years, as research at the intersection of machine learning and finance has grown, predicting stock price movements has become a particularly intriguing issue. Current research focuses primarily on using historical data of the previous day to predict stock movements for the following day, whereas fewer studies use the trading day’s opening data to predict market movements for the current day. We predict intraday price movements of the SSE-50 (Shanghai Securities 50 Index) using stock market opening data as input. Specifically, decision tree, extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), random forest, support vector machines (SVM), and long-short-term memory are developed to predict the movements of the SSE-50 index utilizing opening price data of various time intervals. We also design three trading strategies when different time frequencies of data are used. At the same time-frequency, the results demonstrate that SVM with Gaussian and linear kernels outperform others. The forecasting accuracy at 10-min frequency approaches 70%, which is close to the results at longer time intervals, indicating that intraday trend can be determined by opening price fluctuations and the first 10-min data contains sufficient information to predict the trend for the entire trading day. In addition, trading methods based on the forecast of daily, weekly, and monthly SSE-50 price movement outperform buy-and-hold strategies. Daily trading performs better than the other two strategies. The outcomes of this research can expand the use of machine learning in quantitative trading and enrich intraday trading techniques further.