Predicting extreme events in the stock market using generative adversarial networks

Accurately predicting extreme stock market fluctuations at the right time will allow traders and investors to make better-informed investment decisions and practice more efficient financial risk management. However, extreme stock market events are particularly hard to model because of their scarce and erratic nature. Moreover, strong trading strategies, market stress tests, and portfolio optimization largely rely on sound data. While the application of generative adversarial networks (GANs) for stock forecasting has been an active area of research, there is still a gap in the literature on using GANs for extreme market movement prediction and simulation. In this study, we proposed a framework based on GANs to efficiently model stock prices’ extreme movements. By creating synthetic real-looking data, the framework simulated multiple possible market-evolution scenarios, which can be used to improve the forecasting quality of future market variations. The fidelity and predictive power of the generated data were tested by quantitative and qualitative metrics. Our experimental results on S&P 500 and five emerging market stock data show that the proposed framework is capable of producing a realistic time series by recovering important properties from real data. The results presented in this work suggest that the underlying dynamics of extreme stock market variations can be captured efficiently by some state-of-the-art GAN architectures. This conclusion has great practical implications for investors, traders, and corporations willing to anticipate the future trends of their financial assets. The proposed framework can be used as a simulation tool to mimic stock market behaviors.