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

Alpha factor resources

The research process requires designing and selecting alpha factors with respect to the predictive power of their signals. An algorithmic trading strategy will typically build on multiple alpha factors that send signals for each asset. These factors may be aggregated using an ML model to optimize how the various signals translate into decisions about the timing and sizing of individual positions, as we will see in subsequent chapters.

Alternative algorithmic trading libraries

Additional open source Python libraries for algorithmic trading and data collection include the following (see GitHub for links):

  • QuantConnect is a competitor to Quantopian.
  • WorldQuant offers online competition and recruits community contributors to a crowd-sourced hedge fund.
  • Alpha Trading Labs offers an s high-frequency focused testing infrastructure with a business model similar to Quantopian.
  • The Python Algorithmic Trading Library (PyAlgoTrade) focuses...