Deep Reinforcement Learning in Quantitative Algorithmic Trading: A Review

Tidor-Vlad Pricope

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Algorithmic stock trading has become a staple in today's financial market, the majority of trades being now fully automated. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents proved to be to a force to be reckon with in many complex games like Chess and Go. We can look at the stock market historical price series and movements as a complex imperfect information environment in which we try to maximize return - profit and minimize risk. This paper reviews the progress made so far with deep reinforcement learning in the subdomain of AI in finance, more precisely, automated low-frequency quantitative stock trading. Many of the reviewed studies had only proof-of-concept ideals with experiments conducted in unrealistic settings and no real-time trading applications. For the majority of the works, despite all showing statistically significant improvements in performance compared to established baseline strategies, no decent profitability level was obtained. Furthermore, there is a lack of experimental testing in real-time, online trading platforms and a lack of meaningful comparisons between agents built on different types of DRL or human traders. We conclude that DRL in stock trading has showed huge applicability potential rivalling professional traders under strong assumptions, but the research is still in the very early stages of development.

Date: 2021-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fmk
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.00123 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2106.00123

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().