We report successful results from using deep learning neural networks (DLNNs)
to learn, purely by observation, the behavior of profitable traders in an
electronic market closely modelled on the limit-order-book (LOB) market
mechanisms that are commonly found in the real-world global financial markets
for equities (stocks & shares), currencies, bonds, commodities, and
derivatives. Successful real human traders, and advanced automated algorithmic
trading systems, learn from experience and adapt over time as market conditions
change; our DLNN learns to copy this adaptive trading behavior. A novel aspect
of our work is that we do not involve the conventional approach of attempting
to predict time-series of prices of tradeable securities. Instead, we collect
large volumes of training data by observing only the quotes issued by a
successful sales-trader in the market, details of the orders that trader is
executing, and the data available on the LOB (as would usually be provided by a
centralized exchange) over the period that the trader is active. In this paper
we demonstrate that suitably configured DLNNs can learn to replicate the
trading behavior of a successful adaptive automated trader, an algorithmic
system previously demonstrated to outperform human traders. We also demonstrate
that DLNNs can learn to perform better (i.e., more profitably) than the trader
that provided the training data. We believe that this is the first ever
demonstration that DLNNs can successfully replicate a human-like, or
super-human, adaptive trader operating in a realistic emulation of a real-world
financial market. Our results can be considered as proof-of-concept that a DLNN
could, in principle, observe the actions of a human trader in a real financial
market and over time learn to trade equally as well as that human trader, and
possibly better.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures. To be presented at IEEE Symposium on
Computational Intelligence in Financial Engineering (CIFEr), Bengaluru; Nov
18-21, 201