IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/1303.4351.html

Are random trading strategies more successful than technical ones?

Author

Listed:
  • A. E. Biondo
  • A. Pluchino
  • A. Rapisarda
  • D. Helbing

Abstract

In this paper we explore the specific role of randomness in financial markets, inspired by the beneficial role of noise in many physical systems and in previous applications to complex socio- economic systems. After a short introduction, we study the performance of some of the most used trading strategies in predicting the dynamics of financial markets for different international stock exchange indexes, with the goal of comparing them with the performance of a completely random strategy. In this respect, historical data for FTSE-UK, FTSE-MIB, DAX, and S&P500 indexes are taken into account for a period of about 15-20 years (since their creation until today).

Suggested Citation

  • A. E. Biondo & A. Pluchino & A. Rapisarda & D. Helbing, 2013. "Are random trading strategies more successful than technical ones?," Papers 1303.4351, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2013.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1303.4351
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.4351
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lucas, Robert Jr., 1972. "Expectations and the neutrality of money," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 4(2), pages 103-124, April.
    2. J. Doyne Farmer & Paolo Patelli & Ilija I. Zovko, 2003. "The Predictive Power of Zero Intelligence in Financial Markets," Papers cond-mat/0309233, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2004.
    3. Giacomo Livan & Jun-ichi Inoue & Enrico Scalas, 2012. "On the non-stationarity of financial time series: impact on optimal portfolio selection," Papers 1205.0877, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2012.
    4. William A. Brock, 1993. "Pathways to randomness in the economy: Emergent nonlinearity and chaos in economics and finance," Estudios Económicos, El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Económicos, vol. 8(1), pages 3-55.
    5. Tedeschi, Gabriele & Iori, Giulia & Gallegati, Mauro, 2012. "Herding effects in order driven markets: The rise and fall of gurus," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 81(1), pages 82-96.
    6. John C. Cox & Jonathan E. Ingersoll Jr. & Stephen A. Ross, 2005. "A Theory Of The Term Structure Of Interest Rates," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Sudipto Bhattacharya & George M Constantinides (ed.), Theory Of Valuation, chapter 5, pages 129-164, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    7. Robert C. Merton, 2005. "Theory of rational option pricing," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Sudipto Bhattacharya & George M Constantinides (ed.), Theory Of Valuation, chapter 8, pages 229-288, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    8. Carbone, A. & Castelli, G. & Stanley, H.E., 2004. "Time-dependent Hurst exponent in financial time series," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 344(1), pages 267-271.
    9. Pluchino, Alessandro & Rapisarda, Andrea & Garofalo, Cesare, 2010. "The Peter principle revisited: A computational study," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 389(3), pages 467-472.
    10. William A. Brock & Cars H. Hommes, 2001. "A Rational Route to Randomness," Chapters, in: W. D. Dechert (ed.), Growth Theory, Nonlinear Dynamics and Economic Modelling, chapter 16, pages 402-438, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    11. Chiarella, Carl & He, Xue-Zhong, 2002. "Heterogeneous Beliefs, Risk and Learning in a Simple Asset Pricing Model," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 19(1), pages 95-132, February.
    12. Wang, Jiang, 1994. "A Model of Competitive Stock Trading Volume," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 102(1), pages 127-168, February.
    13. Lux, Thomas, 1995. "Herd Behaviour, Bubbles and Crashes," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 105(431), pages 881-896, July.
    14. Carl Chiarella, 1992. "The Dynamics of Speculative Behaviour," Working Paper Series 13, Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney.
    15. Sargent, Thomas J & Wallace, Neil, 1975. ""Rational" Expectations, the Optimal Monetary Instrument, and the Optimal Money Supply Rule," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 83(2), pages 241-254, April.
    16. Hull, John C & White, Alan D, 1987. "The Pricing of Options on Assets with Stochastic Volatilities," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 42(2), pages 281-300, June.
    17. Benoit Mandelbrot, 2015. "The Variation of Certain Speculative Prices," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Anastasios G Malliaris & William T Ziemba (ed.), THE WORLD SCIENTIFIC HANDBOOK OF FUTURES MARKETS, chapter 3, pages 39-78, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    18. Pluchino, Alessandro & Garofalo, Cesare & Rapisarda, Andrea & Spagano, Salvatore & Caserta, Maurizio, 2011. "Accidental politicians: How randomly selected legislators can improve parliament efficiency," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 390(21), pages 3944-3954.
    19. J. B. Satinover & D. Sornette, 2009. "Illusory versus genuine control in agent-based games," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 67(3), pages 357-367, February.
    20. David H. Cutler & James M. Poterba & Lawrence H. Summers, 1988. "What Moves Stock Prices?," Working papers 487, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Department of Economics.
    21. Engle, Robert F, 1982. "Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity with Estimates of the Variance of United Kingdom Inflation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(4), pages 987-1007, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Alessio Emanuele Biondo & Alessandro Pluchino & Andrea Rapisarda & Dirk Helbing, 2013. "Are Random Trading Strategies More Successful than Technical Ones?," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(7), pages 1-13, July.
    2. Alessio Emanuele Biondo & Alessandro Pluchino & Andrea Rapisarda, 2014. "Micro and Macro Benefits of Random Investments in Financial Markets," Papers 1405.5805, arXiv.org.
    3. Hommes, Cars H., 2006. "Heterogeneous Agent Models in Economics and Finance," Handbook of Computational Economics, in: Leigh Tesfatsion & Kenneth L. Judd (ed.), Handbook of Computational Economics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 23, pages 1109-1186, Elsevier.
    4. Gaunersdorfer, A. & Hommes, C.H. & Wagener, F.O.O., 2000. "Bifurcation Routes to Volatility Clustering," CeNDEF Working Papers 00-04, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Center for Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics and Finance.
    5. Hommes, C.H., 2005. "Heterogeneous Agent Models in Economics and Finance, In: Handbook of Computational Economics II: Agent-Based Computational Economics, edited by Leigh Tesfatsion and Ken Judd , Elsevier, Amsterdam 2006," CeNDEF Working Papers 05-03, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Center for Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics and Finance.
    6. Gaunersdorfer, Andrea & Hommes, Cars H. & Wagener, Florian O.O., 2008. "Bifurcation routes to volatility clustering under evolutionary learning," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 67(1), pages 27-47, July.
    7. Detlef Seese & Christof Weinhardt & Frank Schlottmann (ed.), 2008. "Handbook on Information Technology in Finance," International Handbooks on Information Systems, Springer, number 978-3-540-49487-4, March.
    8. Christian Peretti, 2007. "Long Memory and Hysteresis," Springer Books, in: Gilles Teyssière & Alan P. Kirman (ed.), Long Memory in Economics, pages 363-389, Springer.
    9. He, Xue-Zhong & Li, Youwei, 2015. "Testing of a market fraction model and power-law behaviour in the DAX 30," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 1-17.
    10. Alessio Emanuele Biondo, 2018. "Order book microstructure and policies for financial stability," Studies in Economics and Finance, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 35(1), pages 196-218, March.
    11. Alexander Subbotin & Thierry Chauveau & Kateryna Shapovalova, 2009. "Volatility Models: from GARCH to Multi-Horizon Cascades," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-00390636, HAL.
    12. Biondo, Alessio Emanuele, 2017. "Learning to forecast, risk aversion, and microstructural aspects of financial stability," Economics Discussion Papers 2017-104, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    13. Lux, Thomas, 1997. "Time variation of second moments from a noise trader/infection model," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 1-38, November.
    14. Alexandre Subbotin, 2009. "Volatility Models: from Conditional Heteroscedasticity to Cascades at Multiple Horizons," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 15(3), pages 94-138.
    15. Youwei Li & Xue-Zhong He, 2005. "Long Memory, Heterogeneity, and Trend Chasing," Computing in Economics and Finance 2005 113, Society for Computational Economics.
    16. He, Xue-Zhong & Li, Kai & Santi, Caterina & Shi, Lei, 2022. "Social interaction, volatility clustering, and momentum," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 203(C), pages 125-149.
    17. Giulia Di Nunno & Kk{e}stutis Kubilius & Yuliya Mishura & Anton Yurchenko-Tytarenko, 2023. "From constant to rough: A survey of continuous volatility modeling," Papers 2309.01033, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2025.
    18. C. H. Hommes, 2001. "Financial markets as nonlinear adaptive evolutionary systems," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 1(1), pages 149-167.
    19. Lux, Thomas & Alfarano, Simone, 2016. "Financial power laws: Empirical evidence, models, and mechanisms," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 88(C), pages 3-18.
    20. Hommes, C.H., 2005. "Heterogeneous Agents Models: two simple examples, forthcoming In: Lines, M. (ed.) Nonlinear Dynamical Systems in Economics, CISM Courses and Lectures, Springer, 2005, pp.131-164," CeNDEF Working Papers 05-01, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Center for Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics and Finance.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1303.4351. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.