Algorithmic Trading Using Continuous Action Space Deep Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

This paper proposes a continuous action space deep reinforcement learning approach using TD3 for algorithmic trading in stock and cryptocurrency markets, demonstrating improved performance over traditional methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel trading strategy using TD3 with continuous actions, considering both position and share quantity, for stock and crypto markets.

Findings

The TD3-based strategy outperforms traditional algorithms in return and Sharpe ratio.

Using continuous actions improves trading system performance.

The approach is validated on Amazon stock and Bitcoin markets.

Abstract

Price movement prediction has always been one of the traders' concerns in financial market trading. In order to increase their profit, they can analyze the historical data and predict the price movement. The large size of the data and complex relations between them lead us to use algorithmic trading and artificial intelligence. This paper aims to offer an approach using Twin-Delayed DDPG (TD3) and the daily close price in order to achieve a trading strategy in the stock and cryptocurrency markets. Unlike previous studies using a discrete action space reinforcement learning algorithm, the TD3 is continuous, offering both position and the number of trading shares. Both the stock (Amazon) and cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) markets are addressed in this research to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The achieved strategy using the TD3 is compared with some algorithms using technical analysis, reinforcement learning, stochastic, and deterministic strategies through two standard metrics, Return and Sharpe ratio. The results indicate that employing both position and the number of trading shares can improve the performance of a trading system based on the mentioned metrics.