Adaptive Multi-Strategy Market-Making Agent For Volatile Markets

Abstract

Crypto-currency market uncertainty drives the need to find adaptive solutions to maximise gain or at least to avoid loss throughout the periods of trading activity. Given the high dimensionality and complexity of the state-action space in this domain, it can be treated as a "Narrow AGI" problem with the scope of goals and environments bound to financial markets. Adaptive Multi-Strategy Agent approach for market-making introduces a new solution to maximise positive "alpha" in long-term handling limit order book (LOB) positions by using multiple sub-agents implementing different strategies with a dynamic selection of these agents based on changing market conditions. AMSA provides no specific strategy of its own while being responsible for segmenting the periods of market-making activity into smaller execution sub-periods, performing internal backtesting on historical data on each of the sub-periods, doing sub- agent performance evaluation and re-selection of them at the end of each sub- period, and collecting returns and losses incrementally. With this approach, the return becomes a function of hyper-parameters such as market data granularity (refresh rate), the execution sub-period duration, number of active sub-agents, and their individual strategies. Sub-agent selection for the next trading sub-period is made based on return/loss and alpha values obtained during internal backtesting as well as real trading. Experiments with the AMSA have been performed under different market conditions relying on historical data and proved a high probability of positive alpha throughout the periods of trading activity in the case of properly selected hyper-parameters.