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

Financial Feature Engineering – How to Research Alpha Factors

Algorithmic trading strategies are driven by signals that indicate when to buy or sell assets to generate superior returns relative to a benchmark, such as an index. The portion of an asset's return that is not explained by exposure to this benchmark is called alpha, and hence the signals that aim to produce such uncorrelated returns are also called alpha factors.

If you are already familiar with ML, you may know that feature engineering is a key ingredient for successful predictions. This is no different in trading. Investment, however, is particularly rich in decades of research into how markets work, and which features may work better than others to explain or predict price movements as a result. This chapter provides an overview as a starting point for your own search for alpha factors.

This chapter also presents key tools that facilitate computing and testing alpha...