ReLeAT

REinforcement LEarning for Algorithmic Trading is a python framework for learning medium frequency trading algorithms for MetaTrader 5 (other trading platforms are planned for the future).

DISCALIMER: The information provided herein is for educational and informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial advice. It is not a recommendation to trade or invest real money. Always exercise your own judgment and use common sense when making financial decisions.

Vision

To build a collaborative community where software engineers, data scientists, RL researchers, quants and finance and economic experts can share knowledge. This framework covers the end-to-end process including:

• extracting data from a MetaTrader5
• building custom features from tick data
• gym environment factory to simulate the trading environment
• training a reinforcement learning and/or machine learning algorithms (Tensorflow)
• deploying trained models
• executing trades

In progress:

• additional platforms including Interactive Brokers and Binance
• custom features for candle data and macroeconomic events
• incoporate other deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch
• better sofware development practices, CI/CD, MLOps, tests
• examples for deployment to cloud to AWS and GCP
• monitoring and observability

Key features

• A single container for developing, training, deploying and trading for MetaTrader5 for Linux and Windows (via WSL)
• A simple command line interface to orchestrate the end-to-end process.
• Configuration files that define each step for a specific agent. These are structured to facilitate rapid experimentation and easy integration with Ray's Tune module. types, etc.
• Focuses on Medium Frequency Trading strategies (>1 second and <1 day) using tick data as the input for each step. General latency of the system is ~0.1-3s depending on the complexity of feature engineering and model and resources available.
• In contrast to most other python packages that focus on a deep coverage on one part of the algorithmic trading process, this framework focuses on rapid experimentation lifecycles from idea to deploying and tracking paper trades. FinRL and their associated repos are the most similar. The key difference is that this framework focuses on Forex data.

Prerequisites

• Docker
• Linux or WSL (for windows machine, preferable Ubuntu 20.04)

Installation

1) Clone the repositry

git clone https://github.com/releat215/releat.git

2) Navigate to repository folder

cd releat

3) Download and run prebuilt docker container

Instructions to build to container from the DockerFile or develop using VSCode's dev containers can be found in the development notes. Code is containerised to provide consistency (especially when setting up MT5 in linux), easy deployment and scalability. To build the container:

docker build -t releat -f ./infrastructure/releat/Dockerfile .

Alternatively, a pre-built container can be used:

docker run \
    --net host \
    -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
    -v $(pwd):/workspaces/releat \
    -e DISPLAY \
    --gpus all \
    -it \
    --name releat \
    releat215/releat:1.0

Usage

This is an example of how to train and deploy a simple agent that trade EURUSD. For more information and/or trouble shooting guides, see the section on getting started.

Notes:

• example only works Monday to Friday GMT+2/3 due to metaquotes not allowing data extract or trades on weekend demo accounts.
• In this example, the feature space, RL model and trading configurations are specified in the agents/t00001 folder.
• Steps 4+ are be blocking processes, so open a new terminal to run in parallel.

1) Connect to running docker container

If opening a new terminal, connect interactively to the running docker container:

docker exec -it releat /bin/bash

2) Start services

Starts services necessary to train, deploy and monitor the reinforcement learning trading agent:

• Aerospike: In-memory database to store features and hyperparameters
• Ray: Manages compute and provides RL training and inference logic
• MT5: Download data and trade for forex and futures (depending on broker)
• Tensorboard: Monitor RL training progress
• Redis: In memory cache for storing RL predictions

IMPORTANT: If it is the first time starting up the docker container, or if it has been rebuilt, log in the your MT5 account manually and click the allow autotrading button. If not, steps 3+ will not work.

releat start
releat launch-mt5-api metaquotes general

3) Build training data

Build the features defined by the feature_config.py script and upload to Aerospike.

releat build-train-data t00001

4) Train model

RL model is defined in agent_model.py and the training hyperparameters are defined in agent_config.py, including the number of iterations to run the training. Checkpoints are saved locally, which can then used for deployment

releat train t00001

5) Generate signal

Using the artifacts generated by the training process, this generate signal process is deployed to continuously:

• extract data from MT5
• build features
• makes predictions by invoking the RL agent
• pushes predictions to redis
• loads the latest checkpoint

The frequency of the prediction is controlled by the configs set in agent_config.py

releat generate-signal t00001

6) Launch trader

The trader is agent version agnostic (for now) and is deployed to:

• gets the predictions from redis (in the future it will have capability to aggregate predictions from multiple different RL agents)
• applies some risk logic (such as lot size scaling)
• applies other operational logic (i.e. minimum position hold time, forced close at session close, etc.)
• executes open or close actions for long or short positions

releat launch-trader

Contributing

Actively looking for contributors and collaborators to make this project even better! Please:

1) Create an issue

2) Create a new branch to work on your feature or bug fix. Give it a descriptive name.

3) Include tests for your feature or bug fix

4) Create a pull request

Alternatively, if you want to take the project in a different direction, feel free to fork the project.

Licence

MIT

Maintainer

If you have any questions, please contact:

• releat215@gmail.com