Baseline win rates for neural-network based trading algorithms

Neural networks and other machine-learning systems are used to create automatic financial forecasting and trading systems. To aid comparison of such systems, there is a need for reliable performance metrics. One such metric that may be considered is the win rate. We show how in certain circumstances the win-rate statistic can be very misleading, and to counter this, we propose and define baseline win rates for comparison. We develop empirical and closed-form models for such baselines and validate them against financial data and a neural forecaster.