Using a Genetic Algorithm to Improve Recurrent Reinforcement Learning for Equity Trading

Recurrent reinforcement learning (RRL) has been found to be a successful machine learning technique for building financial trading systems. In this paper, we use a genetic algorithm (GA) to improve the trading results of a RRL-type equity trading system. The proposed trading system takes the advantage of GA’s capability to select an optimal combination of technical indicators, fundamental indicators and volatility indicators for improving out-of-sample trading performance. In our experiment, we use the daily data of 180 S&P stocks (from the period January 2009 to April 2014) to examine the profitability and the stability of the proposed GA-RRL trading system. We find that, after feeding the indicators selected by the GA into the RRL trading system, the out-of-sample trading performance improves as the number of companies with a significantly positive Sharpe ratio increases.