Systematic trading strategies are algorithmic procedures that allocate assets aiming to optimize a certain performance criterion. To obtain an edge in a highly competitive environment, the analyst needs to proper fine-tune its strategy, or discover how to combine weak signals in novel alpha creating manners. Both aspects, namely fine-tuning and combination, have been extensively researched using several methods, but emerging techniques such as Generative Adversarial Networks can have an impact into such aspects. Therefore, our work proposes the use of Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) for trading strategies calibration and aggregation. To this purpose, we provide a full methodology on: (i) the training and selection of a cGAN for time series data; (ii) how each sample is used for strategies calibration; and (iii) how all generated samples can be used for ensemble modelling. To provide evidence that our approach is well grounded, we have designed an experiment with multiple trading strategies, encompassing 579 assets. We compared cGAN with an ensemble scheme and model validation methods, both suited for time series. Our results suggest that cGANs are a suitable alternative for strategies calibration and combination, providing outperformance when the traditional techniques fail to generate any alpha.
TOBB University of Economics and Technology（土耳其中东技术大学经济与技术学院）
Even though computational intelligence techniques have been extensively utilized in financial trading systems, almost all developed models use the time series data for price prediction or identifying buy-sell points. However, in this study we decided to use 2-D stock bar chart images directly without introducing any additional time series associated with the underlying stock. We propose a novel algorithmic trading model CNN-BI (Convolutional Neural Network with Bar Images) using a 2-D Convolutional Neural Network. We generated 2-D images of sliding windows of 30-day bar charts for Dow 30 stock…
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…
Amundi Asset Management（东方汇理资产管理公司）；Ecole des Ponts ParisTech（巴黎高科路桥学校）
This article explores the use of machine learning models to build a market generator. The underlying idea is to simulate artificial multi-dimensional financial time series, whose statistical properties are the same as those observed in the financial markets. In particular, these synthetic data must preserve the probability distribution of asset returns, the stochastic dependence between the different assets and the autocorrelation across time. The article proposes then a new approach for estimating the probability distribution of backtest statistics. The final objective is to develop a framewo…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））
In recent years, many practitioners in quantitative finance have attempted to use Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to build better quantitative trading (QT) strategies. Nevertheless, many existing studies fail to address several serious challenges, such as the non-stationary financial environment and the bias and variance trade-off when applying DRL in the real financial market. In this work, we proposed Safe-FinRL, a novel DRL-based high-freq stock trading strategy enhanced by the near-stationary financial environment and low bias and variance estimation. Our main contributions are twofold: …
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…
Soochow University（苏州大学）；National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；Brookhaven National Laboratory（布鲁克海文国家实验室）
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) for quantitative trading have led to its general superhuman performance in significant trading performance. However, the potential risk of AI trading is a "black box" decision. Some AI computing mechanisms are complex and challenging to understand. If we use AI without proper supervision, AI may lead to wrong choices and make huge losses. Hence, we need to ask about the AI "black box", including why did AI decide to do this or not? Why can people trust AI or not? How can people fix their mistakes? These problems also highlight the challenges that…
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…
Orchestration Framework for Financial Agents: From Algorithmic Trading to Agentic Trading
SecureFinAI Lab, Columbia University（安全金融人工智能实验室，哥伦比亚大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）；Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（拉特格斯理工学院）；Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）
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…
Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão（里斯本大学经济与管理高等学院）；Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学）；University of New Haven（纽黑文大学）；Royal Bank of Canada（加拿大皇家银行）
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has become an appealing solution to algorithmic trading such as high frequency trading of stocks and cyptocurrencies. However, DRL have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks. It follows that algorithmic trading DRL agents may also be compromised by such adversarial techniques, leading to policy manipulation. In this paper, we develop a threat model for deep trading policies, and propose two attack techniques for manipulating the performance of such policies at test-time. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attacks agains…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Rice University（莱斯大学）
Algorithmic trading systems are often completely automated, and deep learning is increasingly receiving attention in this domain. Nonetheless, little is known about the robustness properties of these models. We study valuation models for algorithmic trading from the perspective of adversarial machine learning. We introduce new attacks specific to this domain with size constraints that minimize attack costs. We further discuss how these attacks can be used as an analysis tool to study and evaluate the robustness properties of financial models. Finally, we investigate the feasibility of realisti…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）
Sophisticated machine learning (ML) models to inform trading in the financial sector create problems of interpretability and risk management. Seemingly robust forecasting models may behave erroneously in out of distribution settings. In 2020, some of the world's most sophisticated quant hedge funds suffered losses as their ML models were first underhedged, and then overcompensated. We implement a gradient-based approach for precisely stress-testing how a trading model's forecasts can be manipulated, and their effects on downstream tasks at the trading execution level. We construct inputs -- wh…
University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）；University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）
Experience has shown that trading in stock and cryptocurrency markets has the potential to be highly profitable. In this light, considerable effort has been recently devoted to investigate how to apply machine learning and deep learning to interpret and predict market behavior. This research introduces a new deep neural network architecture and a novel idea of how to prepare financial data before feeding them to the model. In the data preparation part, the first step is to generate many features using technical indicators and then apply the XGBoost model for feature engineering. Splitting data…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；The Canon Institute for Global Studies（佳能全球战略研究所）；Swiss Finance Institute（瑞士金融研究院）；University of Tsukuba（筑波大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
Understanding the mutual relationships between information flows and social activity in society today is one of the cornerstones of the social sciences. In financial economics, the key issue in this regard is understanding and quantifying how news of all possible types (geopolitical, environmental, social, financial, economic, etc.) affect trading and the pricing of firms in organized stock markets. In this article, we seek to address this issue by performing an analysis of more than 24 million news records provided by Thompson Reuters and of their relationship with trading activity for 206 ma…
Infront Financial Technology GmbH（英富朗金融科技有限公司）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Infront Quant AG（英富朗量化股份公司）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
The DEBS Grand Challenge (GC) is an annual programming competition open to practitioners from both academia and industry. The GC 2022 edition focuses on real-time complex event processing of high-volume tick data provided by Infront Financial Technology GmbH. The goal of the challenge is to efficiently compute specific trend indicators and detect patterns in these indicators like those used by real-life traders to decide on buying or selling in financial markets. The data set Trading Data used for benchmarking contains 289 million tick events from approximately 5500+ financial instruments that…
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）
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 …
Event-Aware Sentiment Factors from LLM-Augmented Financial Tweets: A Transparent Framework for Interpretable Quant Trading
Department of Physics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK（剑桥大学物理系）；Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK（剑桥大学应用数学与理论物理系）
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…
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi（德里英德拉普拉斯塔信息技术学院）；Inria Saclay（法国国家信息与自动化研究所萨克雷中心）；CentraleSupélec（巴黎中央理工-高等电力学院）；Université Gustave Eiffel（古斯塔夫·埃菲尔大学）；ESIEE Paris（巴黎高等电子工程师学院）
This work proposes a supervised multi-channel time-series learning framework for financial stock trading. Although many deep learning models have recently been proposed in this domain, most of them treat the stock trading time-series data as 2-D image data, whereas its true nature is 1-D time-series data. Since the stock trading systems are multi-channel data, many existing techniques treating them as 1-D time-series data are not suggestive of any technique to effectively fusion the information carried by the multiple channels. To contribute towards both of these shortcomings, we propose an en…
National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学）；Soochow University（苏州大学）；Brookhaven National Laboratory（布鲁克海文国家实验室）
The importance of deep learning data privacy has gained significant attention in recent years. It is probably to suffer data breaches when applying deep learning to cryptocurrency that lacks supervision of financial regulatory agencies. However, there is little relative research in the financial area to our best knowledge. We apply two representative deep learning privacy-privacy frameworks proposed by Google to financial trading data. We designed the experiments with several different parameters suggested from the original studies. In addition, we refer the degree of privacy to Google and App…
In recent years, machine learning has become prevalent in numerous tasks, including algorithmic trading. Stock market traders utilize machine learning models to predict the market's behavior and execute an investment strategy accordingly. However, machine learning models have been shown to be susceptible to input manipulations called adversarial examples. Despite this risk, the trading domain remains largely unexplored in the context of adversarial learning. In this study, we present a realistic scenario in which an attacker influences algorithmic trading systems by using adversarial learning …
While deep learning has led to remarkable results on a number of challenging problems, researchers have discovered a vulnerability of neural networks in adversarial settings, where small but carefully chosen perturbations to the input can make the models produce extremely inaccurate outputs. This makes these models particularly unsuitable for safety-critical application domains (e.g. self-driving cars) where robustness is extremely important. Recent work has shown that augmenting training with adversarially generated data provides some degree of robustness against test-time attacks. In this pa…
Quantitative trading (QT), which refers to the usage of mathematical models and data-driven techniques in analyzing the financial market, has been a popular topic in both academia and financial industry since 1970s. In the last decade, reinforcement learning (RL) has garnered significant interest in many domains such as robotics and video games, owing to its outstanding ability on solving complex sequential decision making problems. RL's impact is pervasive, recently demonstrating its ability to conquer many challenging QT tasks. It is a flourishing research direction to explore RL techniques'…
Likelihood Lab（似然实验室）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；The London School of Economics and Political Science（伦敦政治经济学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Case Western Reserve University（凯斯西储大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）；National Institute of Health（国立卫生研究院）；Kent State University（肯特州立大学）；California State University Long Beach（加州州立大学长滩分校）
In recent years, there have been quite a few attempts to apply intelligent techniques to financial trading, i.e., constructing automatic and intelligent trading framework based on historical stock price. Due to the unpredictable, uncertainty and volatile nature of financial market, researchers have also resorted to deep learning to construct the intelligent trading framework. In this paper, we propose to use CNN as the core functionality of such framework, because it is able to learn the spatial dependency (i.e., between rows and columns) of the input data. However, different with existing dee…
