Introduction

Table of Contents

Design Principles

  • Plug-and-Play (PnP): Modularity; Handle different markets (say T0 vs. T+1)

  • Completeness and universal: Multiple markets; Various data sources (APIs, Excel, etc); User-friendly variables.

  • Avoid hard-coded parameters

  • Closing the sim-real gap using the “training-testing-trading” pipeline: simulation for training and connecting real-time APIs for testing/trading.

  • Efficient data sampling: accelerate the data sampling process is the key to DRL training! From the ElegantRL project. We know that multi-processing is powerful to reduce the training time (scheduling between CPU + GPU).

  • ransparency: a virtual env that is invisible to the upper layer

  • Flexibility and extensibility: Inheritance might be helpful here

Contributions

  • FinRL is an open source library specifically designed and implemented for quantitative finance. Trading environments incorporating market frictions are used and provided.

  • Trading tasks accompanied by hands-on tutorials with built-in DRL agents are available in a beginner-friendly and reproducible fashion using Jupyter notebook. Customization of trading time steps is feasible.

  • FinRL has good scalability, with fine-tuned state-of-the-art DRL algorithms. Adjusting the implementations to the rapid changing stock market is well supported.

  • Typical use cases are selected to establish benchmarks for the quantitative finance community. Standard backtesting and evaluation metrics are also provided for easy and effective performance evaluation.

With FinRL library, the implementation of powerful DRL trading strategies becomes more accessible, efficient and delightful.