Stock former: A Transformer-Based Profit-Driven Model for Financial Time-Series Forecasting in the Indian Stock Market

This research presents Stock former, a Transformer-based deep learning model for financial time-series forecasting in the Indian stock market. Using hourly data from the top five NIFTY Bank stocks such as HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, SBI, Kodak Bank, and Axis Bank, the model leverages the self-attention mechanism to capture temporal and inter-stock dependencies [3]. A Granger Causality test is employed to identify the most influential stock before training. The architecture integrates 1D-CNN feature extraction, Transformer encoding, and a profit-oriented Stock Tan Loss function to directly optimize trading performance. Results indicate improved predictive accuracy and robust trading signals, offering a scalable and interpretable framework for AI-driven financial forecasting.