Integrating macroeconomic and technical indicators into forecasting the stock market: a hybrid approach for efficient feature selection

Abstract

Stock market prediction is a significant research topic in the financial sector and has been widely investigated by researchers and investors. Forecasting stock markets is challenging because of the nonlinearity, volatility, and dynamics of the data. Additionally, stock markets are affected by various internal and external factors. While most previous studies relied on historical prices and technical indicators (TIs), they ignored the influence of overall economic factors on stock markets. In contrast, this study introduces a robust framework to predict daily log returns by leveraging a combined dataset comprising historical data, TIs, and macroeconomic data, including gold and oil prices, the volatility index, the dollar index, the interest rate, the 10-year Treasury yield, the term spread, and the dividend yield. Moreover, we propose a hybrid feature selection (FS) approach that combines filter and wrapper methods, unlike in previous studies, which relied primarily on a single FS approach or neglected it entirely. The dataset represents diverse sectors and firm sizes, covering five companies: Apple (AAPL Inc.), Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM), Goldman Sachs (GS), Pfizer Inc. (PFE), and Ford Motor Company (F). We apply a hybrid evaluation approach that incorporates 5-fold time series cross-validation (TSCV) with a holdout test set to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed models. The results revealed that despite modest improvements in statistical metrics, FS significantly enhanced the economic performance of the trading strategy, as demonstrated by better returns and Sharpe ratios. The results show that deep learning (DL) models that combine macroeconomic data and the FS process, in addition to historical data and TIs, achieved higher trading returns and produced superior risk-adjusted performance, although they demonstrated slightly higher forecast errors than traditional models. This confirms that statistical accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating financial forecasting models. This work highlights the benefits of the proposed framework for predicting stock returns across different markets, offering significant insights for financial analysts.