A Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for VWAP Strategy Optimization

As a classical optimal trade execution algorithm, Volume Weighted Average Price (VWAP) strategy is favored by brokers. Since it is schedule-based and cannot perform well in a dynamic stock market, optimizing the traditional VWAP strategy via reinforcement learning is worth investigating. Most of the existing reinforcement learning-based execution strategies focus on formulating trading volumes or trading prices separately, ignoring the cooperation between trading volumes and trading prices. To address this issue, we propose a Multi-Agent Deep Q-Network (MADQN) trading framework to optimize the traditional VWAP strategy, which can dynamically adapt to the complex stock market and simultaneously formulate trading prices and volumes at each transaction period. Specifically, we design two different types of agents: 1) volume-driven agent for determining trading volumes at each transaction period and 2) price-driven agent for deciding trading prices. We model our stock market environment in which multiple agents participate as a fully cooperative stochastic game. The volume-driven agent and the price-driven agent take joint actions to interact with the stock market environment and then update their network respectively. We use 9-month level-2 data of eight stocks from different sectors on Shanghai Stock Exchange as experimental data. Experimental results demonstrate that our MADQN trading framework outperforms baselines in terms of several evaluation metrics.