Papers › Few-Shot Learning Patterns in Financial Time-Series for Trend-Following Strategies
Few-Shot Learning Patterns in Financial Time-Series for Trend-Following Strategies
Kieran Wood, Samuel Kessler, Stephen J. Roberts, Stefan Zohren
Forecasting models for systematic trading strategies do not adapt quickly when financial market conditions rapidly change, as was seen in the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, causing many forecasting models to take loss-making positions. To deal with such situations, we propose a novel time-series trend-following forecaster that can quickly adapt to new market conditions, referred to as regimes. We leverage recent developments from the deep learning community and use few-shot learning. We propose the Cross Attentive Time-Series Trend Network -- X-Trend -- which takes positions attending over a context set of financial time-series regimes. X-Trend transfers trends from similar patterns in the context set to make forecasts, then subsequently takes positions for a new distinct target regime. By quickly adapting to new financial regimes, X-Trend increases Sharpe ratio by 18.9% over a neural forecaster and 10-fold over a conventional Time-series Momentum strategy during the turbulent market period from 2018 to 2023. Our strategy recovers twice as quickly from the COVID-19 drawdown compared to the neural-forecaster. X-Trend can also take zero-shot positions on novel unseen financial assets obtaining a 5-fold Sharpe ratio increase versus a neural time-series trend forecaster over the same period. Furthermore, the cross-attention mechanism allows us to interpret the relationship between forecasts and patterns in the context set.
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