Machine learning for cryptocurrency market prediction and trading

We employ and analyze various machine learning models for daily cryptocurrency market prediction and trading. We train the models to predict binary relative daily market movements of the 100 largest cryptocurrencies. Our results show that all employed models make statistically viable predictions, whereby the average accuracy values calculated on all cryptocurrencies range from 52.9% to 54.1%. These accuracy values increase to a range from 57.5% to 59.5% when calculated on the subset of predictions with the 10% highest model confidences per class and day. We find that a long-short portfolio strategy based on the predictions of the employed LSTM and GRU ensemble models yields an annualized out-of-sample Sharpe ratio after transaction costs of 3.23 and 3.12, respectively. In comparison, the buy-and-hold benchmark market portfolio strategy only yields a Sharpe ratio of 1.33. These results indicate a challenge to weak form cryptocurrency market efficiency, albeit the influence of certain limits to arbitrage cannot be entirely ruled out.