Designing loss-aware fitness function for ga-based algorithmic trading

Abstract

In these days, an algorithmic trading in stock or foreign exchange (henceforth forex) market is in fashion, and needs for automatically performing stable asset management are growing. Machine learning techniques are increasingly used to construct trading rules of the algorithmic trading, as researches on the algorithmic trading advance. Our study aims to build an automatic trading agent, and in this paper, we concentrate in designing a module which determines trading rules by machine learning. We use Genetic Algorithm (henceforth GA), and we build trading rules by learning parameters of technical indices. Our contribution in this paper is that we propose new fitness functions in GA, in order to make them robuster to change of market trends. Although profits were used as a fitness function in the previous study, we propose the fitness functions which pay more attention to not making a loss than to gaining profits. As a result of our experiment using real TSE(Tokyo Stock Exchange) data for eight years, the proposed method has outperformed the previous method in terms of gained profits. © 2013 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.