Learning Universal Multi-level Market Irrationality Factors to Improve Stock Return Forecasting

Recent years have witnessed the perfect encounter of deep learning and quantitative trading has achieved great success in stock investment. Numerous deep learning-based models have been developed for forecasting stock returns, leveraging the powerful representation capabilities of neural networks to identify patterns and factors influencing stock prices. These models can effectively capture general patterns in the market, such as stock price trends, volume-price relationships, and time variations. However, the impact of special irrationality factors -- such as market sentiment, speculative behavior, market manipulation, and psychological biases -- have not been fully considered in existing deep stock forecasting models due to their relative abstraction as well as lack of explicit labels and data description. To fill this gap, we propose UMI, a Universal multi-level Market Irrationality factor model to enhance stock return forecasting. The UMI model learns factors that can reflect irrational behaviors in market from both individual stock and overall market levels. For the stock-level, UMI construct an estimated rational price for each stock, which is cointegrated with the stock's actual price. The discrepancy between the actual and the rational prices serves as a factor to indicate stock-level irrational events. Additionally, we define market-level irrational behaviors as anomalous synchronous fluctuations of stocks within a market. Using two self-supervised representation learning tasks, i.e., sub-market comparative learning and market synchronism prediction, the UMI model incorporates market-level irrationalities into a market representation vector, which is then used as the market-level irrationality factor.