Temporal distribution of clusters of investors and their application in prediction with expert advice

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the temporal distribution of trader clusters in FX markets and applies online prediction algorithms with expert advice, demonstrating improved portfolio risk management and profitability through clustering and network methods.

Contribution

It introduces the application of Ewens' Sampling Distribution to trader clusters and compares clustering techniques to enhance online prediction algorithms in financial data.

Findings

Cluster distributions follow Ewens' Sampling Distribution.

Applying the Aggregating Algorithm improves portfolio returns.

Hierarchical clustering and Statistically Validated Networks enhance prediction accuracy.

Abstract

Financial organisations such as brokers face a significant challenge in servicing the investment needs of thousands of their traders worldwide. This task is further compounded since individual traders will have their own risk appetite and investment goals. Traders may look to capture short-term trends in the market which last only seconds to minutes, or they may have longer-term views which last several days to months. To reduce the complexity of this task, client trades can be clustered. By examining such clusters, we would likely observe many traders following common patterns of investment, but how do these patterns vary through time? Knowledge regarding the temporal distributions of such clusters may help financial institutions manage the overall portfolio of risk that accumulates from underlying trader positions. This study contributes to the field by demonstrating that the distribution of clusters derived from the real-world trades of 20k Foreign Exchange (FX) traders (from 2015 to 2017) is described in accordance with Ewens' Sampling Distribution. Further, we show that the Aggregating Algorithm (AA), an on-line prediction with expert advice algorithm, can be applied to the aforementioned real-world data in order to improve the returns of portfolios of trader risk. However we found that the AA 'struggles' when presented with too many trader ``experts'', especially when there are many trades with similar overall patterns. To help overcome this challenge, we have applied and compared the use of Statistically Validated Networks (SVN) with a hierarchical clustering approach on a subset of the data, demonstrating that both approaches can be used to significantly improve results of the AA in terms of profitability and smoothness of returns.