Finalist Group (Top 5)

In this project, we developed a ML process extracting information from the transcript of earning calls to predict stock price movement (net return) on the next trading day.

Records of quaterly earning calls which are provided as paragraphs(.json) and daily stock returns(.csv) from Feb.2013 to Feb.2020 for 464 listed U.S. companies.

1. We splitted each transcript into the manager discussion and Q&A parts because they are different in nature.
2. For each part, we measured the emotions using a Loughran McDonald dictionary and a finance terminology dictionary. Number of words in different categories(positive, negative, uncertain...) are counted which forms input data to following algorithms.
3. Random forests, support vector regressions, and XGBoost are used to predict returns.
4. Five-fold cross validation is implemented to find the best configuration(hyperparameters) and model.
5. Raw predictions on test set are scaled so that they have the same variance as the training set.

1. The number of negative words in Q&A part had quite different distribution than that in manager discussion part.
2. Scaling raw predicted distribution effectively increased prediction accuracy.
3. Random forest worked best among the three models. It has a 55% accuracy in predicting stock price directions and a mean square error of 0.0016(30% less than linear regression) in predicting returns.