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

Trading and managing portfolios with Zipline

In the previous chapter, we introduced Zipline to simulate the computation of alpha factors from trailing market, fundamental, and alternative data for a cross-section of stocks. In this section, we will start acting on the signals emitted by alpha factors. We'll do this by submitting buy and sell orders so we can enter long and short positions or rebalance the portfolio to adjust our holdings to the most recent trade signals.

We will postpone optimizing the portfolio weights until later in this chapter and, for now, just assign positions of equal value to each holding. As mentioned in the previous chapter, an in-depth introduction to the testing and evaluation of strategies that include ML models will follow in Chapter 6, The Machine Learning Process.

Scheduling signal generation and trade execution

We will use the custom MeanReversion factor developed in the previous chapter (see the implementation in...