Deep Reinforcement Learning in Quantitative Algorithmic Trading: A Review
This review addresses the problem of evaluating DRL's potential in automated stock trading for researchers and practitioners, highlighting that current research is incremental and in early stages.
This paper reviews the application of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in quantitative algorithmic stock trading, finding that while many studies show statistically significant improvements over baseline strategies, they often lack real-time testing and fail to achieve decent profitability levels.
Algorithmic stock trading has become a staple in today's financial market, the majority of trades being now fully automated. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents proved to be to a force to be reckon with in many complex games like Chess and Go. We can look at the stock market historical price series and movements as a complex imperfect information environment in which we try to maximize return - profit and minimize risk. This paper reviews the progress made so far with deep reinforcement learning in the subdomain of AI in finance, more precisely, automated low-frequency quantitative stock trading. Many of the reviewed studies had only proof-of-concept ideals with experiments conducted in unrealistic settings and no real-time trading applications. For the majority of the works, despite all showing statistically significant improvements in performance compared to established baseline strategies, no decent profitability level was obtained. Furthermore, there is a lack of experimental testing in real-time, online trading platforms and a lack of meaningful comparisons between agents built on different types of DRL or human traders. We conclude that DRL in stock trading has showed huge applicability potential rivalling professional traders under strong assumptions, but the research is still in the very early stages of development.