Forecasting real time financial series

The author reports how he generated a set of real time neural network forecasts to win the second place in the Financial Series Competition at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks in 1999 (IJCNN'99). The accuracy and profitability of his forecasts are evaluated, and the finance implication is discussed. He provides comprehensive evaluation on the accuracy of the forecasts relative to those from the benchmark model of random walk. Various measures of forecasting accuracy, such as MAE, RMSE, and MAPE are used to facilitate the comparison.