Constructing long-short stock portfolio with a new listwise learn-to-rank algorithm

Xin Zhang, Lan Wu and Zhixue Chen

Quantitative Finance, 2022, vol. 22, issue 2, 321-331

Abstract: Factor strategies have gained growing popularity in industry with the fast development of machine learning. Usually, multi-factors are fed to an algorithm for some cross-sectional return predictions, which are then further used to construct a long-short portfolio. Instead of predicting the value of the stock return, emerging studies predict a ranked stock list using the mature learn-to-rank technology. In this study, we propose a new listwise learn-to-rank loss function which aims to emphasize both the top and the bottom of a rank list. Our loss function, motivated by the long-short strategy, is endogenously shift-invariant and can be viewed as a direct generalization of ListMLE. Under different transformation functions, our loss can lead to consistency with binary classification loss or permutation level 0-1 loss. A probabilistic explanation for our model is also given as a generalized Plackett-Luce model. Based on a dataset of 68 factors in the China A-share market from 2006 to 2019, our empirical study has demonstrated the strength of our method which achieves an out-of-sample annual return of 38% with Sharpe ratio 2.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1080/14697688.2021.1939117

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