Taiwan Stock Investment with Gene Expression Programming

In this paper, we first find out some good trading strategies from the historical series and apply them in the future. The profitable strategies are trained out by the gene expression programming (GEP), which involves some well-known stock technical indicators as features. Our data set collects the 100 stocks with the top capital from the listed companies in the Taiwan stock market. Accordingly, we build a new series called portfolio index as the investment target. For each trading day, we search for some similar template intervals from the historical data and pick out the pertained trading strategies from the strategy pool. These strategies are validated by the return during a few days before the trading day to check whether each of them is suitable or not. Then these suitable strategies decide the buying or selling consensus signal with the majority vote on the trading day. The training period is from 1996/1/6 to 2012/12/28, and the testing period is from 2000/1/4 to 2012/12/28. Two simulation experiments are performed. In experiment 1, the best average accumulated return is 548.97% (average annualized return is 15.47%). In experiment 2, we increase the diversity of trading strategies with more training. The best average accumulated return is increased to 685.31% (average annualized return is 17.18%). These two results are much better than that of the buy-and-hold strategy, whose return is 287.00%. c © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of KES International.