A generalised framework for modelling & forecasting share prices: a field study on modelling and forecasting the share prices from the banking sector

Abstract

Modelling and forecasting the stock market remains a challenge because of the high volatilities in individual stock prices and the market itself. Hence, this topic has received much attention in the literature since forecast errors represent the systematic risk faced by investors. Therefore, the ability to reliably forecast the future values of the shares would provide essential help in reducing that risk to those investors.

The main aim of this research is to develop and calibrate a framework that can be used to model the daily share prices of the companies from the banking sector and hence produce informative and reliable one step-ahead forecasts using an adaptive BPNN. To this end, a novel forecasting algorithm is proposed. This algorithm proposes six steps that, when followed, possibly will lead to obtaining superior forecasting models for the share prices from the banking sector. In addition, novel technical indicators, and further information reflecting market knowledge were developed in this research so as to improve the modelling and forecasting share prices for the banking sector, alongside a novel application of the correctly identified turning points which provided an accurate assessment of the performance of the forecasting models. Furthermore, a selection of a set of inputs that are salient to financial data was identified. The research was to inform and improve share price forecasts of the banking sector.

The historic open share prices for HSBC, Lloyds TSB, RBS and Barclays were used as case studies and the results give evidence to conclude that useable forecasting models can be obtained by employing the developed framework to the share prices from the banking sector in terms of the correctly identified turning points and the direction of the shares which are achieved more than 70% of the time. The empirical results show that using the market knowledge as input generally improved the modelling and forecasting of the share prices from the banking sector.

Date of Award	Jan 2009
Original language	English
Supervisor	Hasan Al-Madfai (Supervisor), Andrew Ware (Supervisor) & Hugh Coombs (Supervisor)