Hedging Properties of Algorithmic Investment Strategies Using Long Short-Term Memory and Time Series Models for Equity Indices

This paper proposes a novel approach to hedging portfolios of risky assets when financial markets are affected by financial turmoils. We introduce a novel approach to diversification on the level of ensemble algorithmic investment strategies (AIS) built on the prices of these assets. We employ four types of diverse models (LSTM, ARIMA-GARCH, momentum, contrarian) to generate price forecasts, which are used to produce investment signals in single and complex AIS. We verify the diversification potential of different types of investment strategies consisting of various assets classes in hedging ensemble AIS built for equity indices (S&P 500). Our conclusion is that LSTM-based strategies outperform the other models and that the best diversifier for the AIS built for the S&P 500 index is the AIS built for Bitcoin. Finally, we test the LSTM model for 1-hour frequency of data. We conclude that it outperforms the results obtained using daily data.