We survey the nascent literature on machine learning in the study of financial markets. We highlight the best examples of what this line of research has to offer and recommend promising directions for future research. This survey is designed for both financial economists interested in grasping...

We examine machine learning and factor-based portfolio optimization. We find that factors based on autoencoder neural networks exhibit a weaker relationship with commonly used characteristic-sorted portfolios than popular dimensionality reduction techniques. Machine learning methods also lead to...

We survey recent methodological contributions in asset pricing using factor models and machine learning. We organize these results based on their primary objectives: estimating expected returns, factors, risk exposures, risk premia, and the stochastic discount factor, as well as model comparison...

This paper develops textual sentiment measures for China's stock market by extracting the textual tone of 60 million messages posted on a major online investor forum in China from 2008 to 2018. We conduct sentiment extraction by using both conventional dictionary methods based on customized word...

For stock market predictions, the essence of the problem is usually predicting the magnitude and direction of the stock price movement as accurately as possible. There are different approaches (e.g., econometrics and machine learning) for predicting stock returns. However, it is non-trivial to...

We establish the out-of-sample predictability of monthly exchange rate changes via machine learning techniques based on 70 predictors capturing country characteristics, global variables, and their interactions. To guard against overfitting, we use the elastic net to estimate a high-dimensional...

Machine Learning models are often considered to be "black boxes" that provide only little room for the incorporation of theory (cf. e.g. Mukherjee, 2017; Veltri, 2017). This article proposes so-called Dynamic Factor Trees (DFT) and Dynamic Factor Forests (DFF) for macroeconomic forecasting, which...

Value-at-risk (VaR) is a useful risk measure broadly used by financial institutions all over the world. VaR has been extensively used to measure systematic risk exposure in developed markets like of the US, Europe and Asia. This paper analyzes the accuracy of VaR measure for Pakistan's emerging...

In this paper I examine whether one can use analyst forecasts of macroeconomic variables to improve investors ex-ante allocation of wealth between stocks and bonds. Such forecasts provide a forward-looking approach which I find improves investor's information set for the myopic stock-bond...