By Sergei Belov, Ernest Chan, Nahid Jetha, and Akshay Nautiyal ABSTRACT We applied Corrective AI (Chan, 2022) to a trading model that takes advantage of the intraday seasonality of forex returns. Breedon and Ranaldo (2012) observed that foreign currencies depreciate vs. the US dollar during their local working hours and appreciate during the local working hours of the US dollar. We first backtested the results of Breedon and Ranaldo on recent EURUSD data from September 2021 to January 2023 and then applied Corrective AI to this trading strategy to achieve a significant increase in performance. Breedon and Ranaldo (2012) described a trading strategy that shorted EURUSD during European working hours (3 AM ET to 9 AM ET, where ET denotes the local time in New York, accounting for daylight savings) and bought EURUSD during US working hours (11 AM ET to 3 PM ET). The rationale is that large-scale institutional buying of the US dollar takes place during European working hours to pa
The story is now familiar: Zillow Group built a home price prediction system based on AI in order to become a market-maker in the housing industry. As a market maker, the goal is simply to buy low and sell high, quickly, and with minimal transaction cost. Backtests showed that its AI model's predictive accuracy was over 96% (Hat tip: Peter U., for that article). In reality, though, it lost half a billion dollars. This is a cautionary tale for anyone using AI to predict prices or returns, including those of us in more liquid markets than housing. Despite Zillow’s failure, the root cause of this discrepancy between backtest and live market-making is well-known, and it has nothing to do with machine learning or AI. Their failure was due to adverse selection , which can happen to any market maker, whether human or machine. In this context, "market maker" is used in a broad sense - a market maker provides liquidity to the market using limit orders. For instance, any mean-rev