• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.157-177
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• 2022

Investors are trading stocks by keeping a close watch on the order information submitted by domestic and foreign investors in real time through Limit Order Book information, so-called price current provided by securities firms. Will order information released in the Limit Order Book be useful in stock price prediction? This study analyzes whether it is significant as a predictor of future stock price up or down when order imbalances appear as investors' buying and selling orders are concentrated to one side during intra-day trading time. Using classification algorithms, this study improved the prediction accuracy of the order imbalance information on the short-term price up and down trend, that is the closing price up and down of the day. Day trading strategies are proposed using the predicted price trends of the classification algorithms and the trading performances are analyzed through empirical analysis. The 5-minute KOSPI200 Index Futures data were analyzed for 4,564 days from January 19, 2004 to June 30, 2022. The results of the empirical analysis are as follows. First, order imbalance information has a significant impact on the current stock prices. Second, the order imbalance information observed in the early morning has a significant forecasting power on the price trends from the early morning to the market closing time. Third, the Support Vector Machines algorithm showed the highest prediction accuracy on the day's closing price trends using the order imbalance information at 54.1%. Fourth, the order imbalance information measured at an early time of day had higher prediction accuracy than the order imbalance information measured at a later time of day. Fifth, the trading performances of the day trading strategies using the prediction results of the classification algorithms on the price up and down trends were higher than that of the benchmark trading strategy. Sixth, except for the K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm, all investment performances using the classification algorithms showed average higher total profits than that of the benchmark strategy. Seventh, the trading performances using the predictive results of the Logical Regression, Random Forest, Support Vector Machines, and XGBoost algorithms showed higher results than the benchmark strategy in the Sharpe Ratio, which evaluates both profitability and risk. This study has an academic difference from existing studies in that it documented the economic value of the total buy & sell order volume information among the Limit Order Book information. The empirical results of this study are also valuable to the market participants from a trading perspective. In future studies, it is necessary to improve the performance of the trading strategy using more accurate price prediction results by expanding to deep learning models which are actively being studied for predicting stock prices recently.