In this paper, to begin with, we define soft information as qualitative, subjective information produced by banks through the establishment of long-term lending relationships. We then highlight the importance of soft information for cooperative and social banks in the screening, pricing and...

In the data mining and machine learning fields, forecasting the direction of price change can be generally formulated as a supervised classfii cation. This paper attempts to predict the direction of daily changes of the Nasdaq Composite Index (NCI) and of the Standard & Poor's 500 Composite...