Applying attention-based BiLSTM and technical indicators in the design and performance analysis of stock trading strategies

With the development of the Internet, information on the stock market has gradually become transparent, and stock information is easy to obtain. For investors, investment performance depends on the amount of capital and effective trading strategies. The analysis tool commonly used by investors and securities analysts is technical analysis (TA). Technical analysis is the study of past and current financial market information, and a large amount of statistical data is used to predict price trends and determine trading strategies. Technical indicators (TIs) are a type of technical analysis that summarizes possible future trends of stock prices based on historical statistical data to assist investors in making decisions. The stock price trend is a typical time series data with special characteristics such as trend, seasonality, and periodicity. In recent years, time series deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated their powerful performance in machine translation, speech processing, and natural language processing fields. This research proposes the concept of attention-based BiLSTM (AttBiLSTM) applied to trading strategy design and verified the effectiveness of a variety of TIs, including stochastic oscillator, RSI, BIAS, W%R, and MACD. This research also proposes two trading strategies that suitable for DNN, combining with TIs and verifying their effectiveness. The main contributions of this research are as follows: (1) As our best knowledge, this is the first research to propose the concept of applying TIs to the LSTM-attention time series model for stock price prediction. (2) This study introduces five well-known TIs, which reached a maximum of 68.83% in the accuracy of stock trend prediction. (3) This research introduces the concept of exporting the probability of the deep model to the trading strategy. On the backtest of TPE0050, the experimental results reached the highest return on investment of 42.74%. (4) This research concludes from an empirical point of view that technical analysis combined with time series deep neural network has significant effects in stock price prediction and return on investment.