Book Image

Hands-On Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading

By : Stefan Jansen
Book Image

Hands-On Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading

By: Stefan Jansen

Overview of this book

The explosive growth of digital data has boosted the demand for expertise in trading strategies that use machine learning (ML). This book enables you to use a broad range of supervised and unsupervised algorithms to extract signals from a wide variety of data sources and create powerful investment strategies. This book shows how to access market, fundamental, and alternative data via API or web scraping and offers a framework to evaluate alternative data. You’ll practice the ML work?ow from model design, loss metric definition, and parameter tuning to performance evaluation in a time series context. You will understand ML algorithms such as Bayesian and ensemble methods and manifold learning, and will know how to train and tune these models using pandas, statsmodels, sklearn, PyMC3, xgboost, lightgbm, and catboost. This book also teaches you how to extract features from text data using spaCy, classify news and assign sentiment scores, and to use gensim to model topics and learn word embeddings from financial reports. You will also build and evaluate neural networks, including RNNs and CNNs, using Keras and PyTorch to exploit unstructured data for sophisticated strategies. Finally, you will apply transfer learning to satellite images to predict economic activity and use reinforcement learning to build agents that learn to trade in the OpenAI Gym.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)

Market and Fundamental Data

Data has always been an essential driver of trading, and traders have long made efforts to gain an advantage by having access to superior information. These efforts date back at least to the rumors that the House Rothschild benefited handsomely from bond purchases upon advance news about the British victory at Waterloo carried by pigeons across the channel.

Today, investments in faster data access take the shape of the Go West consortium of leading high-frequency trading (HFT) firms that connects the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) with Tokyo. The round-trip latency between the CME and the BATS exchange in New York has dropped to close to the theoretical limit of eight milliseconds as traders compete to exploit arbitrage opportunities.

Traditionally, investment strategies mostly relied on publicly available data, with limited efforts to create or...