Research Area:  Machine Learning

Abstract:

In this article, the authors adopt deep reinforcement learning algorithms to design trading strategies for continuous futures contracts. Both discrete and continuous action spaces are considered, and volatility scaling is incorporated to create reward functions that scale trade positions based on market volatility. They test their algorithms on 50 very liquid futures contracts from 2011 to 2019 and investigate how performance varies across different asset classes, including commodities, equity indexes, fixed income, and foreign exchange markets. They compare their algorithms against classical time-series momentum strategies and show that their method outperforms such baseline models, delivering positive profits despite heavy transaction costs. The experiments show that the proposed algorithms can follow large market trends without changing positions and can also scale down, or hold, through consolidation periods.

Keywords:  

Author(s) Name:  Zihao Zhang, Stefan Zohren and Stephen Roberts

Publisher name:  PMR

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3905/jfds.2020.1.030

Volume Information:  

Paper Link:   https://jfds.pm-research.com/content/2/2/25