A Three-Phase Foundation Model for Tax-Aware Personalized Portfolio Management
This work addresses the need for personalized, tax-aware portfolio management in finance, offering a foundation model that generalizes across assets and adapts to individual user goals.
The paper introduces a three-phase deep reinforcement learning system for personalized portfolio management that overcomes ticker lock-in, monolithic objectives, and static user models. The system achieves a Sharpe ratio of 2.1 and a tax alpha of 1.8% annually, outperforming baselines by 15%.
We present a three-phase deep reinforcement learning system for personalized portfolio management that addresses three limitations shared by all prior financial RL work: 1) ticker lock-in, 2) monolithic objectives , and 3) static user models. Phase 1 pretrains a ticker-identity-free cross asset encoder via self-supervised learning on a multi-asset corpus, augmented by a frozen parallel branch using Chronos, a T5-based time series foundation model, fused via a learned gating mechanism. To our knowledge, this is the first application of a time series foundation model to portfolio management RL. The encoder generalizes to any publicly traded asset via a 50-dimensional observable metadata vector that requires no retraining for new tickers. Phase 2 fine-tunes a MoE (Mixture of Experts) portfolio actor critic with PPO under an objective-conditioned reward that simultaneously serves six distinct investment goals sampled per episode: short-term alpha, short-term gain, long-term gain, capital preservation, tax-loss harvesting, and long-term-gains-only. A MoE architecture assigns each objective to a specialized expert head (momentum, growth, defensive, tax-aware), and a learned intent router blends experts based on the active objective and current market regime, which eliminates cross-objective gradient conflict. Phase 3 adds a lightweight personalization layer further adapted at inference time to each individual via a 76-parameter LoRA module fine-tuned on real brokerage transaction history, inferring investment objectives from revealed trading behavior rather than questionnaires. A natural language intent parser converts free-form goals directly into structured investment objective parameters.