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)

How to manage portfolio risk and return

Portfolio management aims to take positions in financial instruments that achieve the desired risk-return trade-off regarding a benchmark. In each period, a manager selects positions that optimize diversification to reduce risks while achieving a target return. Across periods, the positions will be rebalanced to account for changes in weights resulting from price movements to achieve or maintain a target risk profile.

Diversification permits us to reduce risks for a given expected return by exploiting how price movements interact with each other as one asset's gains can make up for another asset's losses. Harry Markowitz invented Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) in 1952 and provided the mathematical tools to optimize diversification by choosing appropriate portfolio weights. Markowitz showed how portfolio risk, measured as the standard...