Sang Il Lee

Sang Il Lee

The high sensitivity of optimized portfolios to estimation errors has prevented their practical application. To mitigate this sensitivity, we propose a new portfolio model called a Deeply Equal-Weighted Subset Portfolio (DEWSP). DEWSP is a subset of top-N ranked assets in an asset universe, the members of which are selected based on the predicted returns from deep learning algorithms and are equally weighted. Herein, we evaluate the performance of DEWSPs of different sizes N in comparison with the performance of other types of portfolios such as optimized portfolios and historically equal-weighed subset portfolios (HEWSPs), which are subsets of top-N ranked assets based on the historical mean returns. We found the following advantages of DEWSPs: First, DEWSPs provides an improvement rate of 0.24% to 5.15% in terms of monthly Sharpe ratio compared to the benchmark, HEWSPs. In addition, DEWSPs are built using a purely data-driven approach rather than relying on the efforts of experts. DEWSPs can also target the relative risk and return to the baseline of the EWP of an asset universe by adjusting the size N. Finally, the DEWSP allocation mechanism is transparent and intuitive. These advantages make DEWSP competitive in practice.

Sang Il Lee, Seong Joon Yoo

In today's increasingly international economy, return and volatility spillover effects across international equity markets are major macroeconomic drivers of stock dynamics. Thus, information regarding foreign markets is one of the most important factors in forecasting domestic stock prices. However, the cross-correlation between domestic and foreign markets is highly complex. Hence, it is extremely difficult to explicitly express this cross-correlation with a dynamical equation. In this study, we develop stock return prediction models that can jointly consider international markets, using multimodal deep learning. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) we visualize the transfer information between South Korea and US stock markets by using scatter plots; (2) we incorporate the information into the stock prediction models with the help of multimodal deep learning; (3) we conclusively demonstrate that the early and intermediate fusion models achieve a significant performance boost in comparison with the late fusion and single modality models. Our study indicates that jointly considering international stock markets can improve the prediction accuracy and deep neural networks are highly effective for such tasks.