Approaching Stock Market Trading with Echo State Networks

The US stock market is an integral part of modern society. Nearly 55% of Americans  own corporate shares in the US stock market (What Percentage of Americans Own Stock?, 2019), and as of June 30th, 2020, the total value of the US stock market was over 35 trillion USD (Total Market Value of U.S. Stock Market, 2020). The stock market is also extremely volatile, and many people have gone bankrupt from poor investments. To minimize the risk and capitalize off the massive amounts of data on corporations and share prices present in the world, algorithmic trading began to rise. Trading algorithms have the potential for huge returns, and while many algorithms employ strategies like Long-Short Equity, very few attempt to use machine learning due to the unpredictable nature of the stock market. Many time series prediction models like autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), and even neural networks like long short term memory (LSTMs) often fail when predicting stock market data, because unlike other time series data, the stock market is almost never univariate, or follows seasonal trends. However, where other models come short, echo state networks (ESNs) excel, due to their reservoir like computing model, which allows them to perform better on messy, non traditional time series data. Using a combination of ESNs to predict prices, and clustering we created an algorithm model that can predict trends with over 95% confidence, but had mixed results accurately predicting returns.