A dynamic herding model with interactions of trading volumes is introduced. At time $t$, an agent trades with a probability, which depends on the ratio of the total trading volume at time $t-1$ to its own trading volume at its last trade. The price return is determined by the volume imbalance and number of trades. The model successfully reproduces the power-law distributions of the trading volume, number of trades and price return, and their relations. Moreover, the generated time series are long-range correlated. We demonstrate that the results are rather robust, and do not depend on the particular form of the trading probability.
We use statistically validated networks, a recently introduced method to validate links in a bipartite system, to identify clusters of investors trading in a financial market. Specifically, we investigate a special database allowing to track the trading activity of individual investors of the stock Nokia. We find that many statistically detected clusters of investors show a very high degree of synchronization in the time when they decide to trade and in the trading action taken. We investigate the composition of these clusters and we find that several of them show an over-expression of specifi…
Financial trading aims to build profitable strategies to make wise investment decisions in the financial market. It has attracted interests in the machine learning community for a long time. This paper proposes to trade financial assets automatically using feature preprocessing skills and Recurrent Reinforcement Learning (RRL) algorithm. The strategy starts from technical indicators extracted from assets' market information. Then these technical indicators are preprocessed by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and eventually inputted to the RRL algorithm to…
Online financial markets can be represented as complex systems where trading dynamics can be captured and characterized at different resolutions and time scales. In this work, we develop a methodology based on non-negative tensor factorization (NTF) aimed at extracting and revealing the multi-timescale trading dynamics governing online financial systems. We demonstrate the advantage of our strategy first using synthetic data, and then on real-world data capturing all interbank transactions (over a million) occurred in an Italian online financial market (e-MID) between 2001 and 2015. Our result…
Prospect theory is widely viewed as the best available descriptive model of how people evaluate risk in experimental settings. According to prospect theory, people are risk-averse with respect to gains and risk-seeking with respect to losses, a phenomenon called "loss aversion". Despite of the fact that prospect theory has been well developed in behavioral economics at the theoretical level, there exist very few large-scale empirical studies and most of them have been undertaken with micro-panel data. Here we analyze over 28.5 million trades made by 81.3 thousand traders of an online financial…
We study the daily trading volume volatility of 17,197 stocks in the U.S. stock markets during the period 1989--2008 and analyze the time return intervals $τ$ between volume volatilities above a given threshold q. For different thresholds q, the probability density function P_q(τ) scales with mean interval <τ> as P_q(τ)=<τ>^{-1}f(τ/<τ>) and the tails of the scaling function can be well approximated by a power-law f(x)~x^{-γ}. We also study the relation between the form of the distribution function P_q(τ) and several financial factors: stock lifetime, market capitalization, volume, and trading …
We implement a market microstructure model including informed, uninformed and heuristic-driven investors, which latter behave in line with loss-aversion and mental accounting. We show that the probability of informed trading (PIN) varies significantly during 2008. In contrast, the probability of heuristic-driven trading (PH) remains constant both before and after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Cross-sectional analysis yields that, unlike PIN, PH is not sensitive to size and volume effects. We show that heuristic-driven traders are universally present in all market segments and their presence…
We use standard physics techniques to model trading and price formation in a market under the assumption that order arrival and cancellations are Poisson random processes. This model makes testable predictions for the most basic properties of a market, such as the diffusion rate of prices, which is the standard measure of financial risk, and the spread and price impact functions, which are the main determinants of transaction cost. Guided by dimensional analysis, simulation, and mean field theory, we find scaling relations in terms of order flow rates. We show that even under completely random…
In modern society, the trading methods and strategies used in financial market have gradually changed from traditional on-site trading to electronic remote trading, and even online automatic trading performed by a pre-programmed computer programs because the continuous development of network and computer computing technology. The quantitative trading, which the main purpose is to automatically formulate people's investment decisions into a fixed and quantifiable operation logic that eliminates all emotional interference and the influence of subjective thoughts and applies this logic to financi…
FLAG-Trader: Fusion LLM-Agent with Gradient-based Reinforcement Learning for Financial Trading
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达公司）；Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院）；TheFinAI；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
We introduce a prototype model in an attempt to capture some aspects of market dynamics simulating a trading mechanism. The model description starts with a discrete-space, continuous-time Markov process describing arrival and movement of orders with different prices. We then perform a re-scaling procedure leading to a deterministic dynamical system controlled by non-linear ordinary differential equations (ODEs). This allows us to introduce approximations for the equilibrium distribution of the model represented by fixed points of deterministic dynamics.
With the development of artificial intelligence,more and more financial practitioners apply deep reinforcement learning to financial trading strategies.However,It is difficult to extract accurate features due to the characteristics of considerable noise,highly non-stationary,and non-linearity of single-scale time series,which makes it hard to obtain high returns.In this paper,we extract a multi-scale feature matrix on multiple time scales of financial time series,according to the classic financial theory-Chan Theory,and put forward to an approach of multi-scale stroke deep deterministic policy…
An automatic program that generates constant profit from the financial market is lucrative for every market practitioner. Recent advance in deep reinforcement learning provides a framework toward end-to-end training of such trading agent. In this paper, we propose an Markov Decision Process (MDP) model suitable for the financial trading task and solve it with the state-of-the-art deep recurrent Q-network (DRQN) algorithm. We propose several modifications to the existing learning algorithm to make it more suitable under the financial trading setting, namely 1. We employ a substantially small re…
High-speed computerized trading, often called "high-frequency trading" (HFT), has increased dramatically in financial markets over the last decade. In the US and Europe, it now accounts for nearly one-half of all trades. Although evidence suggests that HFT contributes to the efficiency of markets, there are concerns it also adds to market instability, especially during times of stress. Currently, it is unclear how or why HFT produces these outcomes. In this paper, I use data from NASDAQ to show that HFT synchronizes prices in financial markets, making the values of related securities change co…
We analyze the relation between earning forecast accuracy and expected profitability of financial analysts. Modeling forecast errors with a multivariate Gaussian distribution, a complete characterization of the payoff of each analyst is provided. In particular, closed-form expressions for the probability density function, for the expectation, and, more generally, for moments of all orders are obtained. Our analysis shows that the relationship between forecast precision and trading profitability need not to be monotonic, and that, for any analyst, the impact on his expected payoff of the correl…
Social, technological and economic time series are divided by events which are usually assumed to be random albeit with some hierarchical structure. It is well known that the interevent statistics observed in these contexts differs from the Poissonian profile by being long-tailed distributed with resting and active periods interwoven. Understanding mechanisms generating consistent statistics have therefore become a central issue. The approach we present is taken from the Continuous Time Random Walk formalism and represents an analytical alternative to models of non-trivial priority that have b…
This paper presents novel results generated from a new simulation model of a contemporary financial market, that cast serious doubt on the previously widely accepted view of the relative performance of various well-known public-domain automated-trading algorithms. Various public-domain trading algorithms have been proposed over the past 25 years in a kind of arms-race, where each new trading algorithm was compared to the previous best, thereby establishing a "pecking order", i.e. a partially-ordered dominance hierarchy from best to worst of the various trading algorithms. Many of these algorit…
Adversarial samples have drawn a lot of attention from the Machine Learning community in the past few years. An adverse sample is an artificial data point coming from an imperceptible modification of a sample point aiming at misleading. Surprisingly, in financial research, little has been done in relation to this topic from a concrete trading point of view. We show that those adversarial samples can be implemented in a trading environment and have a negative impact on certain market participants. This could have far reaching implications for financial markets either from a trading or a regulat…
WealthNet Advisors（财富网顾问公司）；Advanced Digital Sciences Center（高级数字科学中心）
Financial trading is at the forefront of time-series analysis, and has grown hand-in-hand with it. The advent of electronic trading has allowed complex machine learning solutions to enter the field of financial trading. Financial markets have both long term and short term signals and thus a good predictive model in financial trading should be able to incorporate them together. One of the most sought after forms of electronic trading is high-frequency trading (HFT), typically known for microsecond sensitive changes, which results in a tremendous amount of data. LSTMs are one of the most capable…
We present an agent based model of a single asset financial market that is capable of replicating several non-trivial statistical properties observed in real financial markets, generically referred to as stylized facts. While previous models reported in the literature are also capable of replicating some of these statistical properties, in general, they tend to oversimplify either the trading mechanisms or the behavior of the agents. In our model, we strived to capture the most important characteristics of both aspects to create agents that employ strategies inspired on those used in real mark…
The autonomous trading agent is one of the most actively studied areas of artificial intelligence to solve the capital market portfolio management problem. The two primary goals of the portfolio management problem are maximizing profit and restrainting risk. However, most approaches to this problem solely take account of maximizing returns. Therefore, this paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning based trading agent that can manage the portfolio considering not only profit maximization but also risk restraint. We also propose a new target policy to allow the trading agent to learn to prefe…
We study the relationship between price spread, volatility and trading volume. We find that spread forms as a result of interplay between order liquidity and order impact. When trading volume is small adding more liquidity helps improve price accuracy and reduce spread, but after some point additional liquidity begins to deteriorate price. The model allows to connect the bid-ask spread and high-low bars to measurable microstructural parameters and express their dependence on trading volume, volatility and time horizon. Using the established relations, we address the operating spread optimizati…
Agent-based models, particularly those applied to financial markets, demonstrate the ability to produce realistic, simulated system dynamics, comparable to those observed in empirical investigations. Despite this, they remain fairly difficult to calibrate due to their tendency to be computationally expensive, even with recent advances in technology. For this reason, financial agent-based models are frequently validated by demonstrating an ability to reproduce well-known log return time series and central limit order book stylized facts, as opposed to being rigorously calibrated to transaction …
The art of systematic financial trading evolved with an array of approaches, ranging from simple strategies to complex algorithms all relying, primary, on aspects of time-series analysis. Recently, after visiting the trading floor of a leading financial institution, we noticed that traders always execute their trade orders while observing images of financial time-series on their screens. In this work, we built upon the success in image recognition and examine the value in transforming the traditional time-series analysis to that of image classification. We create a large sample of financial ti…
MountainLion: A Multi-Modal LLM-Based Agent System for Interpretable and Adaptive Financial Trading
The University of Texas at Arlington（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校）；Sichuan University（四川大学）；Northwestern University（西北大学）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）；Emory University（埃默里大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）；MountainLion Research（MountainLion研究机构）；Xi’an University of Electronic Science and Technology（西安电子科技大学）；Kyoto University（京都大学）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Nanjing university（南京大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
We introduce a formal framework for analyzing trades in financial markets. An exchange is where multiple buyers and sellers participate to trade. These days, all big exchanges use computer algorithms that implement double sided auctions to match buy and sell requests and these algorithms must abide by certain regulatory guidelines. For example, market regulators enforce that a matching produced by exchanges should be \emph{fair}, \emph{uniform} and \emph{individual rational}. To verify these properties of trades, we first formally define these notions in a theorem prover and then give formal p…
The algorithmic trading comes from digitalisation of the processing of trading assets on financial markets. Since 1980 the computerization of the stock market offers real time processing of financial information. This technological revolution has offered processes and mathematic methods to identify best return on transactions. Current research relates to autonomous transaction systems programmed in certain periods and some algorithms. This offers return opportunities where traders can not intervene. There are about thirty algorithms to assist the traders, the best known are the VWAP, the TWAP,…
We describe a new public-domain open-source simulator of an electronic financial exchange, and of the traders that interact with the exchange, which is a truly distributed and cloud-native system that been designed to run on widely available commercial cloud-computing services, and in which various components can be placed in specified geographic regions around the world, thereby enabling the study of planetary-scale latencies in contemporary automated trading systems. Our simulator allows an exchange server to be launched in the cloud, specifying a particular geographic zone for the cloud hos…
This paper examines the role of algorithmic trading in modern financial markets. Additionally, order types, characteristics, and special features of algorithmic trading are described under the lens provided by the large development of high frequency trading technology. Special order types are examined together with an intuitive description of the implied dynamics of the order book conditional to special orders (iceberg and hidden). The chapter provides an analysis of the transaction costs associated with trading activity and examines the most common trading strategy employed in the market. It …
Reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have shown great success in many challenging quantitative trading tasks, such as portfolio management and algorithmic trading. Especially, intraday trading is one of the most profitable and risky tasks because of the intraday behaviors of the financial market that reflect billions of rapidly fluctuating capitals. However, a vast majority of existing RL methods focus on the relatively low frequency trading scenarios (e.g., day-level) and fail to capture the fleeting intraday investment opportunities due to two major challenges: 1) how to effectively train …
In this study, we investigate the statistical properties of the returns and the trading volume. We show a typical example of power-law distributions of the return and of the trading volume. Next, we propose an interacting agent model of stock markets inspired from statistical mechanics [24] to explore the empirical findings. We show that as the interaction among the interacting traders strengthens both the returns and the trading volume present power-law behavior.
Financial markets display scale-free behavior in many different aspects. The power-law behavior of part of the distribution of individual wealth has been recognized by Pareto as early as the nineteenth century. Heavy-tailed and scale-free behavior of the distribution of returns of different financial assets have been confirmed in a series of works. The existence of a Pareto-like distribution of the wealth of market participants has been connected with the scale-free distribution of trading volumes and price-returns. The origin of the Pareto-like wealth distribution, however, remained obscure. …
Financial trading has been widely analyzed for decades with market participants and academics always looking for advanced methods to improve trading performance. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL), a recently reinvigorated method with significant success in multiple domains, still has to show its benefit in the financial markets. We use a deep Q-network (DQN) to design long-short trading strategies for futures contracts. The state space consists of volatility-normalized daily returns, with buying or selling being the reinforcement learning action and the total reward defined as the cumulative p…
We present a method to compensate statistical errors in the calculation of correlations on asynchronous time series. The method is based on the assumption of an underlying time series. We set up a model and apply it to financial data to examine the decrease of calculated correlations towards smaller return intervals (Epps effect). We show that this statistical effect is a major cause of the Epps effect. Hence, we are able to quantify and to compensate it using only trading prices and trading times.
Quantitative investment is a fundamental financial task that highly relies on accurate stock prediction and profitable investment decision making. Despite recent advances in deep learning (DL) have shown stellar performance on capturing trading opportunities in the stochastic stock market, we observe that the performance of existing DL methods is sensitive to random seeds and network initialization. To design more profitable DL methods, we analyze this phenomenon and find two major limitations of existing works. First, there is a noticeable gap between accurate financial predictions and profit…
AlphaForgeBench: Benchmarking End-to-End Trading Strategy Design with Large Language Models
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
We study the statistical properties of the recurrence intervals $τ$ between successive trading volumes exceeding a certain threshold $q$. The recurrence interval analysis is carried out for the 20 liquid Chinese stocks covering a period from January 2000 to May 2009, and two Chinese indices from January 2003 to April 2009. Similar to the recurrence interval distribution of the price returns, the tail of the recurrence interval distribution of the trading volumes follows a power-law scaling, and the results are verified by the goodness-of-fit tests using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) statistic, t…
The possibility of latency arbitrage in financial markets has led to the deployment of high-speed communication links between distant financial centers. These links are noisy and so there is a need for coding. In this paper, we develop a gametheoretic model of trading behavior where two traders compete to capture latency arbitrage opportunities using binary signalling. Different coding schemes are strategies that trade off between reliability and latency. When one trader has a better channel, the second trader should not compete. With statistically identical channels, we find there are two dif…
A deterministic trading strategy can be regarded as a signal processing element that uses external information and past prices as inputs and incorporates them into future prices. This paper uses a market maker based method of price formation to study the price dynamics induced by several commonly used financial trading strategies, showing how they amplify noise, induce structure in prices, and cause phenomena such as excess and clustered volatility.
Understanding the structure of financial markets deals with suitably determining the functional relation between financial variables. In this respect, important variables are the trading activity, defined here as the number of trades $N$, the traded volume $V$, the asset price $P$, the squared volatility $σ^2$, the bid-ask spread $S$ and the cost of trading $C$. Different reasonings result in simple proportionality relations ("scaling laws") between these variables. A basic proportionality is established between the trading activity and the squared volatility, i.e., $N \sim σ^2$. More sophisti…
