Futures

MOT: A Mixture of Actors Reinforcement Learning Method by Optimal Transport for Algorithmic Trading ArXiv ID: 2407.01577 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Algorithmic trading refers to executing buy and sell orders for specific assets based on automatically identified trading opportunities. Strategies based on reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in addressing algorithmic trading problems. However, the trading patterns differ among market conditions due to shifted distribution data. Ignoring multiple patterns in the data will undermine the performance of RL. In this paper, we propose MOT,which designs multiple actors with disentangled representation learning to model the different patterns of the market. Furthermore, we incorporate the Optimal Transport (OT) algorithm to allocate samples to the appropriate actor by introducing a regularization loss term. Additionally, we propose Pretrain Module to facilitate imitation learning by aligning the outputs of actors with expert strategy and better balance the exploration and exploitation of RL. Experimental results on real futures market data demonstrate that MOT exhibits excellent profit capabilities while balancing risks. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the components of MOT. ...

Commodities Trading through Deep Policy Gradient Methods ArXiv ID: 2309.00630 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Algorithmic trading has gained attention due to its potential for generating superior returns. This paper investigates the effectiveness of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods in algorithmic commodities trading. It formulates the commodities trading problem as a continuous, discrete-time stochastic dynamical system. The proposed system employs a novel time-discretization scheme that adapts to market volatility, enhancing the statistical properties of subsampled financial time series. To optimize transaction-cost- and risk-sensitive trading agents, two policy gradient algorithms, namely actor-based and actor-critic-based approaches, are introduced. These agents utilize CNNs and LSTMs as parametric function approximators to map historical price observations to market positions.Backtesting on front-month natural gas futures demonstrates that DRL models increase the Sharpe ratio by $83%$ compared to the buy-and-hold baseline. Additionally, the risk profile of the agents can be customized through a hyperparameter that regulates risk sensitivity in the reward function during the optimization process. The actor-based models outperform the actor-critic-based models, while the CNN-based models show a slight performance advantage over the LSTM-based models. ...

Deep Inception Networks: A General End-to-End Framework for Multi-asset Quantitative Strategies ArXiv ID: 2307.05522 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract We introduce Deep Inception Networks (DINs), a family of Deep Learning models that provide a general framework for end-to-end systematic trading strategies. DINs extract time series (TS) and cross sectional (CS) features directly from daily price returns. This removes the need for handcrafted features, and allows the model to learn from TS and CS information simultaneously. DINs benefit from a fully data-driven approach to feature extraction, whilst avoiding overfitting. Extending prior work on Deep Momentum Networks, DIN models directly output position sizes that optimise Sharpe ratio, but for the entire portfolio instead of individual assets. We propose a novel loss term to balance turnover regularisation against increased systemic risk from high correlation to the overall market. Using futures data, we show that DIN models outperform traditional TS and CS benchmarks, are robust to a range of transaction costs and perform consistently across random seeds. To balance the general nature of DIN models, we provide examples of how attention and Variable Selection Networks can aid the interpretability of investment decisions. These model-specific methods are particularly useful when the dimensionality of the input is high and variable importance fluctuates dynamically over time. Finally, we compare the performance of DIN models on other asset classes, and show how the space of potential features can be customised. ...

Constructing Time-Series Momentum Portfolios with Deep Multi-Task Learning ArXiv ID: 2306.13661 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract A diversified risk-adjusted time-series momentum (TSMOM) portfolio can deliver substantial abnormal returns and offer some degree of tail risk protection during extreme market events. The performance of existing TSMOM strategies, however, relies not only on the quality of the momentum signal but also on the efficacy of the volatility estimator. Yet many of the existing studies have always considered these two factors to be independent. Inspired by recent progress in Multi-Task Learning (MTL), we present a new approach using MTL in a deep neural network architecture that jointly learns portfolio construction and various auxiliary tasks related to volatility, such as forecasting realized volatility as measured by different volatility estimators. Through backtesting from January 2000 to December 2020 on a diversified portfolio of continuous futures contracts, we demonstrate that even after accounting for transaction costs of up to 3 basis points, our approach outperforms existing TSMOM strategies. Moreover, experiments confirm that adding auxiliary tasks indeed boosts the portfolio’s performance. These findings demonstrate that MTL can be a powerful tool in finance. ...