Packt Publishing

31 July 2020


Buy this Book


By Stefan Jansen

Predictive models to extract signals from market and alternative data for systematic trading strategies with Python, 2nd Edition


About the BookAbout the Author(s)Further Info

Leverage machine learning to design and back-test automated trading strategies for real-world markets using pandas, TA-Lib, scikit-learn, LightGBM, SpaCy, Gensim, TensorFlow 2, Zipline, backtrader, Alphalens, and pyfolio.

Key Features

  • Design, train, and evaluate machine learning algorithms that underpin automated trading strategies
  • Create a research and strategy development process to apply predictive modeling to trading decisions
  • Leverage NLP and deep learning to extract tradeable signals from market and alternative data

Book Description

The explosive growth of digital data has boosted the demand for expertise in trading strategies that use machine learning (ML). This revised and expanded second edition enables you to build and evaluate sophisticated supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning models.

This book introduces end-to-end machine learning for the trading workflow, from the idea and feature engineering to model optimization, strategy design, and backtesting. It illustrates this by using examples ranging from linear models and tree-based ensembles to deep-learning techniques from cutting edge research.

This edition shows how to work with market, fundamental, and alternative data, such as tick data, minute and daily bars, SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, financial news, or satellite images to generate tradeable signals. It illustrates how to engineer financial features or alpha factors that enable an ML model to predict returns from price data for US and international stocks and ETFs. It also shows how to assess the signal content of new features using Alphalens and SHAP values and includes a new appendix with over one hundred alpha factor examples.

By the end, you will be proficient in translating ML model predictions into a trading strategy that operates at daily or intraday horizons, and in evaluating its performance.

“Algorithmic Trading is about timing the market using data and algorithms in order to improve your own trading performance, outcomes, and earnings. The wealth of techniques, algorithms, and models that are used for those purposes are presented comprehensively in this giant book and are also applicable to countless other predictive modeling applications and diverse use cases. That makes this an excellent machine learning book for all learners and users of predictive algorithms in data science and analytics.”

Dr Kirk Borne, Principal Data Scientist, Data Science Fellow, and Executive Advisor at Booz Allen Hamilton, and co-author of Ten Signs of Data Science Maturity


Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading headshot

Stefan is the founder and CEO of Applied AI. He advises Fortune 500 companies, investment firms, and startups across industries on data & AI strategy, building data science teams, and developing end-to-end machine learning solutions for a broad range of business problems.

Before his current venture, he was a partner and managing director at an international investment firm, where he built the predictive analytics and investment research practice. He was also a senior executive at a global fintech company with operations in 15 markets, advised Central Banks in emerging markets, and consulted for the World Bank.

He holds Master’s degrees in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and in Economics from Harvard and Free University Berlin, and a CFA Charter. He has worked in six languages across Europe, Asia, and the Americas and taught data science at Datacamp and General Assembly.