abstract = "Most forecasting algorithms use a physical time scale
for studying price movement in financial markets,
making the flow of physical time discontinuous. The use
of a physical time scale can make companies oblivious
to significant activities in the market, which poses a
risk. Directional changes is a different and newer
approach, which uses an event-based time scale. This
approach summarises data into alternating trends called
upward directional change and downward directional
change. Each of these trends are further dismembered
into directional change (DC) event and overshoot (OS)
event. We present a genetic programming (GP) algorithm
that evolves equations that express linear and
non-linear relationships between the length of DC and
OS events in a given dataset. This allows us to have an
expectation when a trend will reverse, which can lead
to increased profitability. This novel trend reversal
estimation approach is then used as part of a DC-based
trading strategy. We aim to appraise whether the new
knowledge can lead to greater excess return. We assess
the efficiency of the modified trading strategy on 250
different directional changes datasets from five
different thresholds and five different currency pairs,
consisting of intraday data from the foreign exchange
(Forex) spot market. Results show that our algorithm is
able to return profitable trading strategies and
statistically outperform state-of-the-art financial
trading strategies, such as technical analysis, buy and
hold and other DC-based trading strategies.",