A Deterministic Policy Gradient Method for Order Execution and Option Hedging in the Presence of Market Impact

In this article, an iterative deterministic policy gradient method for finding optimal strategies in the presence of market impact is introduced. The derivation of the policy gradient sheds light on a proper way of handling the market impact of trades in the context of reinforcement learning. Similar to many machine learning methods, the proposed deterministic policy gradient method is based on mini-batch stochastic gradient descent optimization. The method is demonstrated to consistently perform well for several different objectives and market dynamics when applied to the financial applications of order execution and option hedging.