Enhancing Time Series Momentum Strategies Using Deep Neural Networks
This work addresses the need for more effective trading strategies in finance, though it is incremental as it builds on existing volatility scaling frameworks.
The paper tackled the problem of designing time series momentum strategies by introducing Deep Momentum Networks, which learn trend estimation and position sizing through deep learning, resulting in a Sharpe-optimized LSTM that improved traditional methods by more than two times in backtesting on 88 futures contracts.
While time series momentum is a well-studied phenomenon in finance, common strategies require the explicit definition of both a trend estimator and a position sizing rule. In this paper, we introduce Deep Momentum Networks -- a hybrid approach which injects deep learning based trading rules into the volatility scaling framework of time series momentum. The model also simultaneously learns both trend estimation and position sizing in a data-driven manner, with networks directly trained by optimising the Sharpe ratio of the signal. Backtesting on a portfolio of 88 continuous futures contracts, we demonstrate that the Sharpe-optimised LSTM improved traditional methods by more than two times in the absence of transactions costs, and continue outperforming when considering transaction costs up to 2-3 basis points. To account for more illiquid assets, we also propose a turnover regularisation term which trains the network to factor in costs at run-time.