This paper examines the main drawbacks of technical analysis. Although this is widely used by practitioners, from an academic perspective it can only be seen as a form of "voodoo finance". In particular, it runs into the following pitfalls: Subjectivity; Doubtful assumptions; Unjustified...

Statistical learning models have profoundly changed the rules of trading on the stock exchange. Quantitative analysts try to utilise them predict potential profits and risks in a better manner. However, the available studies are mostly focused on testing the increasingly complex machine learning...

Predicting long-term equity market returns is of great importance for investors to strategically allocate their assets. We apply machine learning methods to forecast 10-year-ahead U.S. stock returns and compare the results to traditional Shiller regression-based forecasts more commonly used in...

Recessions and expansions are often caused or reinforced by developments in private consumption - the largest component of aggregate demand - which, as a result, varies over the business cycle. As such, an accurate measurement of the cyclical component of consumption and an understanding of its...

This paper extends the machine learning methods developed in Han et al. (2019) for forecasting cross-sectional stock returns to a time-series context. The methods use the elastic net to refine the simple combination return forecast from Rapach et al. (2010). In a time-series application focused...

Assessing potential output and the output gap is essential for policy-making and fiscal surveillance. The European Commission proposes a production function methodology that involves the estimation of two classes of Gaussian state space models. This paper presents the R package RGAP which...

The present paper develops Adaptive Trees, a new machine learning approach specifically designed for economic forecasting. Economic forecasting is made difficult by economic complexity, which implies non-linearities (multiple interactions and discontinuities) and unknown structural changes (the...

The paper seeks to answer the question of how price forecasting can contribute to which techniques gives the most accurate results in the futures commodity market. A total of two families of models (decision trees, artificial intelligence) were used to produce estimates for 2018 and 2022 for 21-...