We investigate the potential of the analysis of noisy non-stationary time series by quantizing it into streams of discrete symbols and applying finite-memory symbolic predictors. Careful quantization can reduce the noise in the time series to make model estimation more amenable. We apply the quantization strategy in a realistic setting involving financial forecasting and trading. In particular, using historical data, we simulate the trading of straddles on the financial indexes DAX and FTSE 100 ...