A novel Deep Reinforcement Learning based automated stock trading system using cascaded LSTM networks

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have been increasingly used to construct stock trading strategies, but they often face performance challenges when applied to financial data with low signal-to-noise ratios and unevenness, as these methods were originally designed for the gaming community. To address this issue, we propose a DRL-based stock trading system that leverages Cascaded Long Short-Term Memory (CLSTM-PPO Model) to capture the hidden information in the daily stock data. Our model adopts a cascaded structure with two stages of carefully designed deep LSTM networks: it uses one LSTM to extract the time-series features from a sequence of daily stock data in the first stage, and then the features extracted are fed to the agent in the reinforcement learning algorithm for training, while the actor and the critic in the agent also use a LSTM network. We conduct experiments on stock market datasets from four major indices: the Dow Jones Industrial index (DJI) in the US, the Shanghai Stock Exchange 50 (SSE50) in China, S&P BSE Sensex Index (SENSEX) in India, and the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 (FTSE100) in the UK. We compare our model with several benchmark models, including: (i) a model based on a buy-and-hold strategy; (ii) a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) model with Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) policy; (iii) some up-to-date models like the MLP model, LSTM model, Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGBM) model, and histogram -based gradient boosting model; and (iv) an ensemble strategy model. The experimental results show that our model outperforms the baseline models in several key metrics, such as cumulative returns, maximum earning rate, and average profitability per trade. The improvements range from 5% to 52%, depending on the metric and the stock index. This indicates that our proposed method is a promising way to build an automated stock trading system.