Papers › Market Making via Reinforcement Learning

Market Making via Reinforcement Learning

11 Apr 2018arXiv:1804.04216archive 2025-07-28

Thomas Spooner, John Fearnley, Rahul Savani, Andreas Koukorinis

Market making is a fundamental trading problem in which an agent provides liquidity by continually offering to buy and sell a security. The problem is challenging due to inventory risk, the risk of accumulating an unfavourable position and ultimately losing money. In this paper, we develop a high-fidelity simulation of limit order book markets, and use it to design a market making agent using temporal-difference reinforcement learning. We use a linear combination of tile codings as a value function approximator, and design a custom reward function that controls inventory risk. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by showing that our agent outperforms both simple benchmark strategies and a recent online learning approach from the literature.

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tspooner/rl_markets officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubBSD-3-Clause report

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Reinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)reinforcement-learning

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