Book Image

Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading - Second Edition

By : Stefan Jansen
Book Image

Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading - Second Edition

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 revised and expanded second edition enables you to build and evaluate sophisticated supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning models. This book introduces end-to-end machine learning for the trading workflow, from the idea and feature engineering to model optimization, strategy design, and backtesting. It illustrates this by using examples ranging from linear models and tree-based ensembles to deep-learning techniques from cutting edge research. This edition shows how to work with market, fundamental, and alternative data, such as tick data, minute and daily bars, SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, financial news, or satellite images to generate tradeable signals. It illustrates how to engineer financial features or alpha factors that enable an ML model to predict returns from price data for US and international stocks and ETFs. It also shows how to assess the signal content of new features using Alphalens and SHAP values and includes a new appendix with over one hundred alpha factor examples. By the end, you will be proficient in translating ML model predictions into a trading strategy that operates at daily or intraday horizons, and in evaluating its performance.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
24
References
25
Index

ML for trading – strategies and use cases

In practice, we apply ML to trading in the context of a specific strategy to meet a certain business goal. In this section, we briefly describe how trading strategies have evolved and diversified, and outline real-world examples of ML applications, highlighting how they relate to the content covered in this book.

The evolution of algorithmic strategies

Quantitative strategies have evolved and become more sophisticated in three waves:

  1. In the 1980s and 1990s, signals often emerged from academic research and used a single or very few inputs derived from market and fundamental data. AQR, one of the largest quantitative hedge funds today, was founded in 1998 to implement such strategies at scale. These signals are now largely commoditized and available as ETF, such as basic mean-reversion strategies.
  2. In the 2000s, factor-based investing proliferated based on the pioneering work by Eugene Fama and Kenneth French and...