With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, data-driven methods effectively overcome limitations in traditional portfolio optimization. Conventional models primarily employ long-only mechanisms, excluding highly correlated assets to diversify risk. However, incorporating short-selling enables low-risk arbitrage through hedging correlated assets. This paper constructs a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) portfolio management framework with short-selling mechanisms conforming to actual trading rules, exploring strategies for excess returns in China's A-share market. Key innovations include: (1) Development of a comprehensive short-selling mechanism in continuous trading that accounts for dynamic evolution of transactions across time periods; (2) Design of a long-short optimization framework integrating deep neural networks for processing multi-dimensional financial time series with mean Sharpe ratio reward functions. Empirical results show the DRL model with short-selling demonstrates significant optimization capabilities, achieving consistent positive returns during backtesting periods. Compared to traditional approaches, this model delivers superior risk-adjusted returns while reducing maximum drawdown. From an allocation perspective, the DRL model establishes a robust investment style, enhancing defensive capabilities through strategic avoidance of underperforming assets and balanced capital allocation. This research contributes to portfolio theory while providing novel methodologies for quantitative investment practice.
Solving portfolio management problems using deep reinforcement learning has been getting much attention in finance for a few years. We have proposed a new method using experts signals and historical price data to feed into our reinforcement learning framework. Although experts signals have been used in previous works in the field of finance, as far as we know, it is the first time this method, in tandem with deep RL, is used to solve the financial portfolio management problem. Our proposed framework consists of a convolutional network for aggregating signals, another convolutional network for …
Schumpeter School of Business and Economics（熊彼特商业与经济学院）；University of Wuppertal（伍珀塔尔大学）
This paper proposes a Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm for financial portfolio trading based on Deep Q-learning. The algorithm is capable of trading high-dimensional portfolios from cross-sectional datasets of any size which may include data gaps and non-unique history lengths in the assets. We sequentially set up environments by sampling one asset for each environment while rewarding investments with the resulting asset's return and cash reservation with the average return of the set of assets. This enforces the agent to strategically assign capital to assets that it predicts to perform …
A Comparative Analysis of Portfolio Optimization Using Mean-Variance, Hierarchical Risk Parity, and Reinforcement Learning Approaches on the Indian Stock Market
Reinforcement Learning for Portfolio Optimization with a Financial Goal and Defined Time Horizons
AIMS South Africa /Stellenbosch university, South Africa（AIMS南非 /斯托滕博斯大学，南非）；University of South Africa, South Africa（南非大学，南非）；Michigan State University, USA（密歇根州立大学，美国）
Financial portfolio management is one of the problems that are most frequently encountered in the investment industry. Nevertheless, it is not widely recognized that both Kelly Criterion and Risk Parity collapse into Mean Variance under some conditions, which implies that a universal solution to the portfolio optimization problem could potentially exist. In fact, the process of sequential computation of optimal component weights that maximize the portfolio's expected return subject to a certain risk budget can be reformulated as a discrete-time Markov Decision Process (MDP) and hence as a stoc…
GERAD & Department of Decision Sciences, HEC Montréal（蒙特利尔高等商学院决策科学系与GERAD联合机构）；Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa（渥太华大学特尔弗管理学院）；Evovest（伊沃维斯特）
The problem of portfolio management represents an important and challenging class of dynamic decision making problems, where rebalancing decisions need to be made over time with the consideration of many factors such as investors preferences, trading environments, and market conditions. In this paper, we present a new portfolio policy network architecture for deep reinforcement learning (DRL)that can exploit more effectively cross-asset dependency information and achieve better performance than state-of-the-art architectures. In particular, we introduce a new property, referred to as \textit{a…
LLM-based Personalized Portfolio Recommender: Integrating Large Language Models and Reinforcement Learning for Intelligent Investment Strategy Optimization
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Ross School of Business, University of Michigan（密歇根大学罗斯商学院）；School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University（斯坦福大学人文与科学学院）
We propose to solve large scale Markowitz mean-variance (MV) portfolio allocation problem using reinforcement learning (RL). By adopting the recently developed continuous-time exploratory control framework, we formulate the exploratory MV problem in high dimensions. We further show the optimality of a multivariate Gaussian feedback policy, with time-decaying variance, in trading off exploration and exploitation. Based on a provable policy improvement theorem, we devise a scalable and data-efficient RL algorithm and conduct large scale empirical tests using data from the S&P 500 stocks. We foun…
Financial portfolio management (PM) is one of the most applicable problems in reinforcement learning (RL) owing to its sequential decision-making nature. However, existing RL-based approaches rarely focus on scalability or reusability to adapt to the ever-changing markets. These approaches are rigid and unscalable to accommodate the varying number of assets of portfolios and increasing need for heterogeneous data. Also, RL agents in the existing systems are ad-hoc trained and hardly reusable for different portfolios. To confront the above problems, a modular design is desired for the systems t…
Portfolio management aims at maximizing the return on investment while minimizing risk by continuously reallocating the assets forming the portfolio. These assets are not independent but correlated during a short time period. A graph convolutional reinforcement learning framework called DeepPocket is proposed whose objective is to exploit the time-varying interrelations between financial instruments. These interrelations are represented by a graph whose nodes correspond to the financial instruments while the edges correspond to a pair-wise correlation function in between assets. DeepPocket con…
We approach the continuous-time mean-variance (MV) portfolio selection with reinforcement learning (RL). The problem is to achieve the best tradeoff between exploration and exploitation, and is formulated as an entropy-regularized, relaxed stochastic control problem. We prove that the optimal feedback policy for this problem must be Gaussian, with time-decaying variance. We then establish connections between the entropy-regularized MV and the classical MV, including the solvability equivalence and the convergence as exploration weighting parameter decays to zero. Finally, we prove a policy imp…
In this paper, we implement three state-of-art continuous reinforcement learning algorithms, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Policy Gradient (PG)in portfolio management. All of them are widely-used in game playing and robot control. What's more, PPO has appealing theoretical propeties which is hopefully potential in portfolio management. We present the performances of them under different settings, including different learning rates, objective functions, feature combinations, in order to provide insights for parameters tuning, features selectio…
Machine Learning (ML) has been embraced as a powerful tool by the financial industry, with notable applications spreading in various domains including investment management. In this work, we propose a full-cycle data-driven investment robo-advising framework, consisting of two ML agents. The first agent, an inverse portfolio optimization agent, infers an investor's risk preference and expected return directly from historical allocation data using online inverse optimization. The second agent, a deep reinforcement learning (RL) agent, aggregates the inferred sequence of expected returns to form…
Portfolio management is the decision-making process of allocating an amount of fund into different financial investment products. Cryptocurrencies are electronic and decentralized alternatives to government-issued money, with Bitcoin as the best-known example of a cryptocurrency. This paper presents a model-less convolutional neural network with historic prices of a set of financial assets as its input, outputting portfolio weights of the set. The network is trained with 0.7 years' price data from a cryptocurrency exchange. The training is done in a reinforcement manner, maximizing the accumul…
Variational Quantum Circuit-Based Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Portfolio Optimization
Chair of Information Systems Humboldt University Berlin（信息系统教授 Humboldt 大学柏林）；Department of Mathematics National University of Singapore（数学系 新加坡国立大学）；Bucharest University of Economic Studies（布加勒斯特经济大学）
Deep Reinforcement learning is a branch of unsupervised learning in which an agent learns to act based on environment state in order to maximize its total reward. Deep reinforcement learning provides good opportunity to model the complexity of portfolio choice in high-dimensional and data-driven environment by leveraging the powerful representation of deep neural networks. In this paper, we build a portfolio management system using direct deep reinforcement learning to make optimal portfolio choice periodically among S\&P500 underlying stocks by learning a good factor representation (as input)…
Shandong University of Finance and Economic（山东财经大学）
This scientific paper propose a novel portfolio optimization model using an improved deep reinforcement learning algorithm. The objective function of the optimization model is the weighted sum of the expectation and value at risk(VaR) of portfolio cumulative return. The proposed algorithm is based on actor-critic architecture, in which the main task of critical network is to learn the distribution of portfolio cumulative return using quantile regression, and actor network outputs the optimal portfolio weight by maximizing the objective function mentioned above. Meanwhile, we exploit a linear t…
Generating an investment strategy using advanced deep learning methods in stock markets has recently been a topic of interest. Most existing deep learning methods focus on proposing an optimal model or network architecture by maximizing return. However, these models often fail to consider and adapt to the continuously changing market conditions. In this paper, we propose the Multi-Agent reinforcement learning-based Portfolio management System (MAPS). MAPS is a cooperative system in which each agent is an independent "investor" creating its own portfolio. In the training procedure, each agent i…
The process of continuously reallocating funds into financial assets, aiming to increase the expected return of investment and minimizing the risk, is known as portfolio management. Processing speed and energy consumption of portfolio management have become crucial as the complexity of their real-world applications increasingly involves high-dimensional observation and action spaces and environment uncertainty, which their limited onboard resources cannot offset. Emerging neuromorphic chips inspired by the human brain increase processing speed by up to 1000 times and reduce power consumption b…
Portfolio management via reinforcement learning is at the forefront of fintech research, which explores how to optimally reallocate a fund into different financial assets over the long term by trial-and-error. Existing methods are impractical since they usually assume each reallocation can be finished immediately and thus ignoring the price slippage as part of the trading cost. To address these issues, we propose a hierarchical reinforced stock trading system for portfolio management (HRPM). Concretely, we decompose the trading process into a hierarchy of portfolio management over trade execut…
Traditional portfolio management methods can incorporate specific investor preferences but rely on accurate forecasts of asset returns and covariances. Reinforcement learning (RL) methods do not rely on these explicit forecasts and are better suited for multi-stage decision processes. To address limitations of the evaluated research, experiments were conducted on three markets in different economies with different overall trends. By incorporating specific investor preferences into our RL models' reward functions, a more comprehensive comparison could be made to traditional methods in risk-retu…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Guangzhou Laboratory（广州实验室）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Portfolio Selection is an important real-world financial task and has attracted extensive attention in artificial intelligence communities. This task, however, has two main difficulties: (i) the non-stationary price series and complex asset correlations make the learning of feature representation very hard; (ii) the practicality principle in financial markets requires controlling both transaction and risk costs. Most existing methods adopt handcraft features and/or consider no constraints for the costs, which may make them perform unsatisfactorily and fail to control both costs in practice. In…
Stock portfolio optimization is the process of constant re-distribution of money to a pool of various stocks. In this paper, we will formulate the problem such that we can apply Reinforcement Learning for the task properly. To maintain a realistic assumption about the market, we will incorporate transaction cost and risk factor into the state as well. On top of that, we will apply various state-of-the-art Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms for comparison. Since the action space is continuous, the realistic formulation were tested under a family of state-of-the-art continuous policy gradien…
Capital Fund Management（资本基金管理公司）；École Centrale-Supélec（中央理工-高等电力学院）；École Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）
Can deep reinforcement learning algorithms be exploited as solvers for optimal trading strategies? The aim of this work is to test reinforcement learning algorithms on conceptually simple, but mathematically non-trivial, trading environments. The environments are chosen such that an optimal or close-to-optimal trading strategy is known. We study the deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm and show that such a reinforcement learning agent can successfully recover the essential features of the optimal trading strategies and achieve close-to-optimal rewards.
Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Diversified Portfolio Management Across Global Equity Markets
Quantitative Finance Research Group, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw（经济科学学院量化金融研究组，华沙大学）；Quantitative Finance Research Group, Department of Quantitative Finance and Machine Learning, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw（经济科学学院量化金融与机器学习系量化金融研究组，华沙大学）
In this thesis, we develop a comprehensive account of the expressive power, modelling efficiency, and performance advantages of so-called trading agents (i.e., Deep Soft Recurrent Q-Network (DSRQN) and Mixture of Score Machines (MSM)), based on both traditional system identification (model-based approach) as well as on context-independent agents (model-free approach). The analysis provides conclusive support for the ability of model-free reinforcement learning methods to act as universal trading agents, which are not only capable of reducing the computational and memory complexity (owing to th…
Asset allocation (or portfolio management) is the task of determining how to optimally allocate funds of a finite budget into a range of financial instruments/assets such as stocks. This study investigated the performance of reinforcement learning (RL) when applied to portfolio management using model-free deep RL agents. We trained several RL agents on real-world stock prices to learn how to perform asset allocation. We compared the performance of these RL agents against some baseline agents. We also compared the RL agents among themselves to understand which classes of agents performed better…
Navigating the Social Welfare Frontier: Portfolios for Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning
Harvard University, Cambridge, USA（哈佛大学）；Google Deepmind（谷歌DeepMind）；Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA（佐治亚理工学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA（麻省理工学院）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
Portfolio management (PM) is a fundamental financial planning task that aims to achieve investment goals such as maximal profits or minimal risks. Its decision process involves continuous derivation of valuable information from various data sources and sequential decision optimization, which is a prospective research direction for reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we propose SARL, a novel State-Augmented RL framework for PM. Our framework aims to address two unique challenges in financial PM: (1) data heterogeneity -- the collected information for each asset is usually diverse, noisy…
Dynamic portfolio optimization is the process of sequentially allocating wealth to a collection of assets in some consecutive trading periods, based on investors' return-risk profile. Automating this process with machine learning remains a challenging problem. Here, we design a deep reinforcement learning (RL) architecture with an autonomous trading agent such that, investment decisions and actions are made periodically, based on a global objective, with autonomy. In particular, without relying on a purely model-free RL agent, we train our trading agent using a novel RL architecture consisting…
Your Offline Policy is Not Trustworthy: Bilevel Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Portfolio Optimization
MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China（人工智能教育部重点实验室、人工智能研究院、上海交通大学）；Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago, USA（计算机科学系、伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
The QLBS model is a discrete-time option hedging and pricing model that is based on Dynamic Programming (DP) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). It combines the famous Q-Learning method for RL with the Black-Scholes (-Merton) model's idea of reducing the problem of option pricing and hedging to the problem of optimal rebalancing of a dynamic replicating portfolio for the option, which is made of a stock and cash. Here we expand on several NuQLear (Numerical Q-Learning) topics with the QLBS model. First, we investigate the performance of Fitted Q Iteration for a RL (data-driven) solution to the mo…
Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）；Fidelity Investments（富达投资集团）；NYU Tandon School of Engineering（纽约大学坦登工程学院）
We present a reinforcement learning approach to goal based wealth management problems such as optimization of retirement plans or target dated funds. In such problems, an investor seeks to achieve a financial goal by making periodic investments in the portfolio while being employed, and periodically draws from the account when in retirement, in addition to the ability to re-balance the portfolio by selling and buying different assets (e.g. stocks). Instead of relying on a utility of consumption, we present G-Learner: a reinforcement learning algorithm that operates with explicitly defined one-…
In this work we deal with the funding costs rising from hedging the risky securities underlying a target volatility strategy (TVS), a portfolio of risky assets and a risk-free one dynamically rebalanced in order to keep the realized volatility of the portfolio on a certain level. The uncertainty in the TVS risky portfolio composition along with the difference in hedging costs for each component requires to solve a control problem to evaluate the option prices. We derive an analytical solution of the problem in the Black and Scholes (BS) scenario. Then we use Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniq…
