Spectral Portfolio Optimisation with LSTM Stock Price Prediction

Abstract: Nobel Prize-winning modern portfolio theory (MPT) has been considered to be one of the most important and influential economic theories within finance and investment management. MPT assumes investors to be riskaverse and uses the variance of asset returns as a proxy of risk to maximise the performance of a portfolio. Successful portfolio management reply, thus on accurate risk estimate and asset return prediction. Risk estimates are commonly obtained through traditional asset pricing factor models, which allow the systematic risk to vary over time domain but not in the frequency space. This approach can impose limitations in, for instance, risk estimation. To tackle this shortcoming, interest in applications of spectral analysis to financial time series has increased lately. Among others, the novel spectral portfolio theory and the spectral factor model which demonstrate enhancement in portfolio performance through spectral risk estimation [1][11]. Moreover, stock price prediction has always been a challenging task due to its non-linearity and non-stationarity. Meanwhile, Machine learning has been successfully implemented in a wide range of applications where it is infeasible to accomplish the needed tasks traditionally. Recent research has demonstrated significant results in single stock price prediction by artificial LSTM neural network [6][34]. This study aims to evaluate the combined effect of these two advancements in a portfolio optimisation problem and optimise a spectral portfolio with stock prices predicted by LSTM neural networks. To do so, we began with mathematical derivation and theoretical presentation and then evaluated the portfolio performance generated by the spectral risk estimates and the LSTM stock price predictions, as well as the combination of the two. The result demonstrates that the LSTM predictions alone performed better than the combination, which in term performed better than the spectral risk alone.