Benchmark

Performance Metrics

FinRL-Meta provides the following unified metrics to measure the trading performance:

  • Cumulative return: \(R = \frac{V - V_0}{V_0}\), where V is final portfolio value, and \(V_0\) is original capital.

  • Annualized return: \(r = (1+R)^\frac{365}{t}-1\), where t is the number of trading days.

  • Annualized volatility: \({\sigma}_a = \sqrt{\frac{\sum_{i=1}^{n}{(r_i-\bar{r})^2}}{n-1}}\), where \(r_i\) is the annualized return in year i, \(\bar{r}\) is the average annualized return, and n is the number of years.

  • Sharpe ratio: \(S = \frac{r - r_f}{{\sigma}_a}\), where \(r_f\) is the risk-free rate.

  • Max. drawdown The maximal percentage loss in portfolio value.

The following baseline trading strategies are provided for comparisons:

  • Passive trading strategy, a well-known long-term strategy. The investors just buy and hold selected stocks or indexes without further activities.

  • **Mean-variance and min-variance strategy, both strategies look for a balance between risks and profits. It selects a diversified portfolio to achieve higher profits at lower risk.

  • Equally weighted strategy, a portfolio allocation strategy that gives equal weights to different assets, avoiding allocating overly high weights on particular stocks.

Tutorials in Jupyter Notebooks

For educational purposes, we provide Jupyter notebooks as tutorials to help newcomers get familiar with the whole pipeline. Notebooks can be found here

  • Stock trading: We apply popular DRL algorithms to trade multiple stocks.

  • Portfolio allocation: We use DRL agents to optimize asset allocation in a set of stocks.

  • Cryptocurrency trading: We reproduce the experiment on 10 popular cryptocurrencies.

  • Multi-agent RL for liquidation strategy analysis: We reproduce the experiment in [7]. The multi-agent optimizes the shortfalls in the liquidation task, which is to sell given shares of one stock sequentially within a given period, considering the costs arising from the market impact and the risk aversion.

  • Ensemble strategy for stock trading: We reproduce the experiment in that employed an ensemble strategy of several DRL algorithms on the stock trading task.

  • Paper trading demo: We provide a demo for paper trading. Users could combine their own strategies or trained agents in paper trading.

  • China A-share demo: We provide a demo based on the China A-share market data.

  • Hyperparameter tuning: We provide several demos for hyperparameter tuning using Optuna or Ray Tune, since hyperparameter tuning is critical for better performance.