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Balancing Profit, Risk, and Sustainability for Portfolio Management

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  • Charl Maree
  • Christian W. Omlin

Abstract

Stock portfolio optimization is the process of continuous reallocation of funds to a selection of stocks. This is a particularly well-suited problem for reinforcement learning, as daily rewards are compounding and objective functions may include more than just profit, e.g., risk and sustainability. We developed a novel utility function with the Sharpe ratio representing risk and the environmental, social, and governance score (ESG) representing sustainability. We show that a state-of-the-art policy gradient method - multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradients (MADDPG) - fails to find the optimum policy due to flat policy gradients and we therefore replaced gradient descent with a genetic algorithm for parameter optimization. We show that our system outperforms MADDPG while improving on deep Q-learning approaches by allowing for continuous action spaces. Crucially, by incorporating risk and sustainability criteria in the utility function, we improve on the state-of-the-art in reinforcement learning for portfolio optimization; risk and sustainability are essential in any modern trading strategy and we propose a system that does not merely report these metrics, but that actively optimizes the portfolio to improve on them.

Suggested Citation

  • Charl Maree & Christian W. Omlin, 2022. "Balancing Profit, Risk, and Sustainability for Portfolio Management," Papers 2207.02134, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2207.02134
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

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    2. Jaydip Sen & Subhasis Dasgupta, 2023. "Portfolio Optimization: A Comparative Study," Papers 2307.05048, arXiv.org.

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