Data Modeling the Stock Market Today - Common Pitfalls to Avoid

The lure of creating models to predict the stock market has drawn talent from fields beyond finance and economics, reaching into disciplines such as physics, computational chemistry, applied mathematics, electrical engineering and perhaps most recently statistics and what we now refer to as data science. The attraction is clear - the stock market (and the economy/internet at large) throws off massive and ever increasing reams of data from garden variety time-series to complex structured data sets like quarterly financials, to unstructured data sets like conference call transcripts, news articles and of course — tweets! While all this data holds promise - it also holds traps and blind alleys that can be deceptively tricky to avoid. In this session we’ll review some of the common (but not easy!) pitfalls to avoid in creating models for predicting stock returns; overfitting & exploding model complexity, non-stationary processes, time-travel illusions, under-estimation of real-world costs, and as many more as we have time to cover.