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Using an artificial neural network (ANN), a fixed universe of approximately 1500 equities from the Value Line index are rank-ordered by their predicted price changes over the next quarter. Inputs to the network consist only of the ten prior quarterly percentage changes in price and in earnings for each equity (by quarter, not accumulated), converted to a relative rank scaled around zero. Thirty simulated portfolios are constructed respectively of the 10, 20,..., and 100 top ranking equities (long portfolios), the 10, 20,..., 100 bottom ranking equities (short portfolios) and their hedged sets (long-short portfolios). In a 29-quarter simulation from the end of the third quarter of 1994 through the fourth quarter of 2001 that duplicates real-world trading of the same method employed during 2002, all portfolios are held fixed for one quarter. Results are compared to the S&P 500, the Value Line universe itself, trading the universe of equities using the proprietary ``Value Line Ranking System'' (to which this method is in some ways similar), and to a Martingale method of ranking the same equities. The cumulative returns generated by the network predictor significantly exceed those generated by the S&P 500, the overall universe, the Martingale and Value Line prediction methods and are not eroded by trading costs. The ANN shows significantly positive Jensen's alpha, i.e., anomalous risk-adjusted expected return. A time series of its global performance shows a clear antipersistence. However, its performance is significantly better than a simple one-step Martingale predictor, than the Value Line system itself and than a simple buy and hold strategy, even when transaction costs are accounted for., Comment: 36 pages, 16 figures, 8 tables

The Minority Game (MG), the Majority Game (MAJG) and the Dollar Game ($G) are important and closely-related versions of market-entry games designed to model different features of real-world financial markets. In a variant of these games, agents measure the performance of their available strategies over a fixed-length rolling window of prior time-steps. These are the so-called Time Horizon MG/MAJG/$G (THMG, THMAJG, TH$G). Their probabilistic dynamics may be completely characterized in Markov-chain formulation. Games of both the standard and TH variants generate time-series that may be understood as arising from a stochastically perturbed determinism because a coin toss is used to break ties. The average over the binomially-distributed coin-tosses yields the underlying determinism. In order to quantify the degree of this determinism and of higher-order perturbations, we decompose the sign of the time-series they generate (analogous to a market price time series) into a superposition of weighted Hamiltonian cycles on graphs (exactly in the TH variants and approximately in the standard versions). The cycle decomposition also provides a ``dissection'' of the internal dynamics of the games and a quantitative measure of the degree of determinism. We discuss how the outperformance of strategies relative to agents in the THMG (the ``illusion of control'') and the reverse in the THMAJG and TH$G (i.e., genuine control) may be understood on a cycle-by-cycle basis. The decomposition offers as well a new metric for comparing different game dynamics to real-world financial time-series and a method for generating predictors. We apply the cycle predictor a real-world market, with significantly positive returns for the latter., Comment: 58 page including 16 figures and 9 tables

In the Minority, Majority and Dollar Games (MG, MAJG, $G), synthetic agents compete for rewards, at each time-step acting in accord with the previously best-performing of their limited sets of strategies. Different components and/or aspects of real-world financial markets are modelled by these games. In the MG, agents compete for scarce resources; in the MAJG gents imitate the group in the hope of exploiting a trend; in the $G agents attempt to successfully predict and benefit from trends as well as changes in the direction of a market. It has been previously shown that in the MG for a reasonable number of preliminary time steps preceding equilibrium (Time Horizon MG, THMG), agents' attempt to optimize their gains by active strategy selection is ``illusory'': The calculated hypothetical gains of their individual strategies is greater on average than agents' actual average gains. Furthermore, if a small proportion of agents deliberately choose and act in accord with their seemingly worst performing strategy, these outper-form all other agents on average, and even attain mean positive gain, otherwise rare for agents in the MG. This latter phenomenon raises the question as to how well the optimization procedure works in the MAJG and $G. We demonstrate that the illusion of control is absent in MAJG and $G. In other words, low-entropy (more informative) strategies under-perform high-entropy (or random) strategies in the MG but outperform them in the MAJG and $G. This provides further clarification of the kinds of situations subject to genuine control, and those not, in set-ups a priori defined to emphasize the importance of optimization., Comment: 22 pages

Human beings like to believe they are in control of their destiny. This ubiquitous trait seems to increase motivation and persistence, and is probably evolutionarily adaptive. But how good really is our ability to control? How successful is our track record in these areas? There is little understanding of when and under what circumstances we may over-estimate or even lose our ability to control and optimize outcomes, especially when they are the result of aggregations of individual optimization processes. Here, we demonstrate analytically using the theory of Markov Chains and by numerical simulations in two classes of games, the Minority game and the Parrondo Games, that agents who optimize their strategy based on past information actually perform worse than non-optimizing agents. In other words, low-entropy (more informative) strategies under-perform high-entropy (or random) strategies. This provides a precise definition of the "illusion of control" in set-ups a priori defined to emphasize the importance of optimization., Comment: 17 pages, four figures, 1 table

Both single-player Parrondo games (SPPG) and multi-player Parrondo games (MPPG) display the Parrondo Effect (PE) wherein two or more individually fair (or Llosing) games yield a net winning outcome if alternated periodically or randomly. (There is a more formal, less restrictive definition of the PE.) We illustrate that, when subject to an elementary optimization rule, the PG displays degraded rather than enhanced returns. Optimization provides only the illusion of control, when low-entropy strategies (i.e. which use more information) under-perform random strategies (with maximal entropy). This illusion is unfortuntately widespread in many human attempts to manage or predict complex systems. For the PG, the illusion is especially striking in that the optimization rule reverses an already paradoxical-seeming positive gain - the Parrondo effect proper - and turns it negative. While this phenomenon has been previously demonstrated using somewhat artificial conditions in the MPPG (L. Dinios and J.M.R. Parrondo. Europhysics Letters 63, 319 (2003); J.M.R. Parrondo et al. Advances in Condensed Matter and Statistical Mechanics, eds. E. Korutcheva and R. Cuerno, Nova Science Publishers, 2003), we demonstrate it in the natural setting of a history-dependent SPPG., Comment: 8 page with 1 table