Recently, control theory including stochastic optimal control and various machine-learning-based artificial intelligence methods have become major tools in the field of financial engineering. In this paper, we briefly review some recent papers utilizing stochastic optimal control theory in the fields of the pair trading for mean-reverting markets and the trend-following strategy, and consider a couple of strategies utilizing both stochastic optimal control theory and machine learning methods to acquire more flexible and accessible tools. Illustrative simulations show that the considered strategies can yield encouraging results when applied to a set of real financial market data.
Recently, the constrained index tracking problem, in which the task of trading a set of stocks is performed so as to closely follow an index value under some constraints, has often been considered as an important application domain for control theory. Because this problem can be conveniently viewed and formulated as an optimal decision-making problem in a highly uncertain and stochastic environment, approaches based on stochastic optimal control methods are particularly pertinent. Since stochastic optimal control problems cannot be solved exactly except in very simple cases, approximations are required in most practical problems to obtain good suboptimal policies. In this paper, we present a procedure for finding a suboptimal solution to the constrained index tracking problem based on approximate dynamic programming. Illustrative simulation results show that this procedure works well when applied to a set of real financial market data.
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