C++ Design Patterns for Low-latency Applications Including High-frequency Trading

This work aims to bridge the existing knowledge gap in the optimisation of latency-critical code, specifically focusing on high-frequency trading (HFT) systems. The research culminates in three main contributions: the creation of a Low-Latency Programming Repository, the optimisation of a market-neutral statistical arbitrage pairs trading strategy, and the implementation of the Disruptor pattern in C++. The repository serves as a practical guide and is enriched with rigorous statistical benchmarking, while the trading strategy optimisation led to substantial improvements in speed and profitability. The Disruptor pattern showcased significant performance enhancement over traditional queuing methods. Evaluation metrics include speed, cache utilisation, and statistical significance, among others. Techniques like Cache Warming and Constexpr showed the most significant gains in latency reduction. Future directions involve expanding the repository, testing the optimised trading algorithm in a live trading environment, and integrating the Disruptor pattern with the trading algorithm for comprehensive system benchmarking. The work is oriented towards academics and industry practitioners seeking to improve performance in latency-sensitive applications

From Deep Filtering to Deep Econometrics

Calculating true volatility is an essential task for option pricing and risk management. However, it is made difficult by market microstructure noise. Particle filtering has been proposed to solve this problem as it favorable statistical properties, but relies on assumptions about underlying market dynamics. Machine learning methods have also been proposed but lack interpretability, and often lag in performance. In this paper we implement the SV-PF-RNN: a hybrid neural network and particle filter architecture. Our SV-PF-RNN is designed specifically with stochastic volatility estimation in mind. We then show that it can improve on the performance of a basic particle filter

Applying Deep Learning to Calibrate Stochastic Volatility Models

Stochastic volatility models, where the volatility is a stochastic process, can capture most of the essential stylized facts of implied volatility surfaces and give more realistic dynamics of the volatility smile/skew. However, they come with the significant issue that they take too long to calibrate. Alternative calibration methods based on Deep Learning (DL) techniques have been recently used to build fast and accurate solutions to the calibration problem. Huge and Savine developed a Differential Machine Learning (DML) approach, where Machine Learning models are trained on samples of not only features and labels but also differentials of labels to features. The present work aims to apply the DML technique to price vanilla European options (i.e. the calibration instruments), more specifically, puts when the underlying asset follows a Heston model and then calibrate the model on the trained network. DML allows for fast training and accurate pricing. The trained neural network dramatically reduces Heston calibration's computation time. In this work, we also introduce different regularisation techniques, and we apply them notably in the case of the DML. We compare their performance in reducing overfitting and improving the generalisation error. The DML performance is also compared to the classical DL (without differentiation) one in the case of Feed-Forward Neural Networks. We show that the DML outperforms the DL. The complete code for our experiments is provided in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/asridi/DML-Calibration-Heston-Mode

Transformers versus LSTMs for electronic trading

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, long short term memory (LSTM), one kind of recurrent neural network (RNN), has been widely applied in time series prediction. Like RNN, Transformer is designed to handle the sequential data. As Transformer achieved great success in Natural Language Processing (NLP), researchers got interested in Transformer's performance on time series prediction, and plenty of Transformer-based solutions on long time series forecasting have come out recently. However, when it comes to financial time series prediction, LSTM is still a dominant architecture. Therefore, the question this study wants to answer is: whether the Transformer-based model can be applied in financial time series prediction and beat LSTM. To answer this question, various LSTM-based and Transformer-based models are compared on multiple financial prediction tasks based on high-frequency limit order book data. A new LSTM-based model called DLSTM is built and new architecture for the Transformer-based model is designed to adapt for financial prediction. The experiment result reflects that the Transformer-based model only has the limited advantage in absolute price sequence prediction. The LSTM-based models show better and more robust performance on difference sequence prediction, such as price difference and price movement

Derivatives Sensitivities Computation under Heston Model on GPU

This report investigates the computation of option Greeks for European and Asian options under the Heston stochastic volatility model on GPU. We first implemented the exact simulation method proposed by Broadie and Kaya and used it as a baseline for precision and speed. We then proposed a novel method for computing Greeks using the Milstein discretisation method on GPU. Our results show that the proposed method provides a speed-up up to 200x compared to the exact simulation implementation and that it can be used for both European and Asian options. However, the accuracy of the GPU method for estimating Rho is inferior to the CPU method. Overall, our study demonstrates the potential of GPU for computing derivatives sensitivies with numerical methods

Quasi-Monte Carlo methods for calculating derivatives sensitivities on the GPU

The calculation of option Greeks is vital for risk management. Traditional pathwise and finite-difference methods work poorly for higher-order Greeks and options with discontinuous payoff functions. The Quasi-Monte Carlo-based conditional pathwise method (QMC-CPW) for options Greeks allows the payoff function of options to be effectively smoothed, allowing for increased efficiency when calculating sensitivities. Also demonstrated in literature is the increased computational speed gained by applying GPUs to highly parallelisable finance problems such as calculating Greeks. We pair QMC-CPW with simulation on the GPU using the CUDA platform. We estimate the delta, vega and gamma Greeks of three exotic options: arithmetic Asian, binary Asian, and lookback. Not only are the benefits of QMC-CPW shown through variance reduction factors of up to $1.0 \times 10^{18}$, but the increased computational speed through usage of the GPU is shown as we achieve speedups over sequential CPU implementations of more than $200$x for our most accurate method.Comment: 26 pages, 12 figure

Identification and validation of Triamcinolone and Gallopamil as treatments for early COVID-19 via an in silico repurposing pipeline

SARS-CoV-2, the causative virus of COVID-19 continues to cause an ongoing global pandemic. Therapeutics are still needed to treat mild and severe COVID-19. Drug repurposing provides an opportunity to deploy drugs for COVID-19 more rapidly than developing novel therapeutics. Some existing drugs have shown promise for treating COVID-19 in clinical trials. This in silico study uses structural similarity to clinical trial drugs to identify two drugs with potential applications to treat early COVID-19. We apply in silico validation to suggest a possible mechanism of action for both. Triamcinolone is a corticosteroid structurally similar to Dexamethasone. Gallopamil is a calcium channel blocker structurally similar to Verapamil. We propose that both these drugs could be useful to treat early COVID-19 infection due to the proximity of their targets within a SARS-CoV-2-induced protein-protein interaction network to kinases active in early infection, and the APOA1 protein which is linked to the spread of COVID-19.Comment: 32 pages, 4 figure

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements