Common approaches to test for the economic value of directional forecasts are based on the classical Chi-square test for independence, Fisher’s exact test or the Pesaran and Timmerman (1992) test for market timing. These tests are asymptotically valid for serially independent observations....

We propose information theoretic tests for serial independence and linearity in time series. The test statisticsare based on the conditional mutual information, a general measure of dependence between lagged variables. In caseof rejecting the null hypothesis, this readily provides insights into...