Using LSTM Neural Networks To Predict Daily Stock Returns

Abstract: Long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks have been proven to be effective for time series prediction, even in some instances where the data is non-stationary. This lead us to examine their predictive ability of stock market returns, as the development of stock prices and returns tend to be a non-stationary time series. We used daily stock trading data to let an LSTM train models at predicting daily returns for 60 stocks from the OMX30 and Nasdaq-100 indices. Subsequently, we measured their accuracy, precision, and recall. The mean accuracy was 49.75 percent, meaning that the observed accuracy was close to the accuracy one would observe by randomly selecting a prediction for each day and lower than the accuracy achieved by blindly predicting all days to be positive. Finally, we concluded that further improvements need to be made for models trained by LSTMs to have any notable predictive ability in the area of stock returns.