Quants at JP Morgan and other prominent firms are fascinated right now with self-teaching algorithms that are employed to hedge options portfolios and they are looking forward to doing the same for single stocks and other types of portfolios.
Kris Devasabai filed this report for Risk.net:
So the JP Morgan quants tried something different. Instead of feeding the machine a model, they let it formulate its own hedging strategy. An artificial neural network was trained to identify patterns and relationships from historical data. It then used a technique called reinforcement learning to refine its strategies based on simulated trades.
The result of the experiment will come as no surprise to anyone that has been following recent advances in artificial intelligence. The so-called ‘deep hedging’ strategies developed by the machine outperformed existing ones based on classical models.
Last year, JP Morgan began using the self-taught algorithms to hedge some of its vanilla index options portfolios. The bank now plans to roll out similar technology for hedging single stocks, baskets and light exotics.
Deep hedging feels like the start of something big in quantitative finance. Several other firms, including Bank of America and Societe Generale, are working on similar projects. Some quants are already talking about a future of “model-free pricing”.
But the machines are not infallible. Their performance is heavily reliant on the data used to train them, and errors in the training data, no matter how small, can make the resulting strategies very unstable. And even a well-trained machine cannot generalise or extrapolate beyond its training data, so it must be retrained every time there is a structural change in the markets.
The other problem is interpretability. Machines are not very transparent. Neural networks have complex structures and comb through millions of data points, which makes it hard to pinpoint how they come up with answers, or why something went wrong.
To operate these machines safely, humans will have to learn new skills. “People who today spend their time adjusting for the deficiencies in classic Greek-type models now need to understand how the statistics work,” Hans Buehler, global head of equities analytics, automation and optimisation at JP Morgan, said in a recent Risk.net podcast.
