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Deep Reinforcement Learning in Quantitative Algorithmic Trading: A Review

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  • Tidor-Vlad Pricope

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.

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  • Tidor-Vlad Pricope, 2021. "Deep Reinforcement Learning in Quantitative Algorithmic Trading: A Review," Papers 2106.00123, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2106.00123
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    Cited by:

    1. Xiao-Yang Liu & Jingyang Rui & Jiechao Gao & Liuqing Yang & Hongyang Yang & Zhaoran Wang & Christina Dan Wang & Jian Guo, 2021. "FinRL-Meta: A Universe of Near-Real Market Environments for Data-Driven Deep Reinforcement Learning in Quantitative Finance," Papers 2112.06753, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2022.
    2. Reilly Pickard & Yuri Lawryshyn, 2023. "Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Stock Option Hedging: A Review," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 11(24), pages 1-19, December.
    3. Sina Montazeri & Akram Mirzaeinia & Haseebullah Jumakhan & Amir Mirzaeinia, 2024. "CNN-DRL for Scalable Actions in Finance," Papers 2401.06179, arXiv.org.
    4. Xiao-Yang Liu & Ziyi Xia & Jingyang Rui & Jiechao Gao & Hongyang Yang & Ming Zhu & Christina Dan Wang & Zhaoran Wang & Jian Guo, 2022. "FinRL-Meta: Market Environments and Benchmarks for Data-Driven Financial Reinforcement Learning," Papers 2211.03107, arXiv.org.

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