Pairs-trading under geometric Brownian motions: An optimal strategy with cutting losses

• Autores: Ruyu Liu, Zhen Wu, Qing Zhang
• Localización: Automatica: A journal of IFAC the International Federation of Automatic Control, ISSN 0005-1098, Nº. 115, 2020
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Pairs trading is about simultaneously trading a pair of stocks. A pairs trade is triggered when their prices diverge and consists of a short position of the strong stock and a long position of the weak one. Pairs trading bets on the reversal of their price strengths. In this paper, we study the optimal pairs-trading problem under general geometric Brownian motions and focus on trading with cutting losses. The objective is to trade the pairs over time to maximize an overall return with a fixed transaction cost. Our optimal policy is characterized by threshold curves obtained by solving the associated HJB equations. We provide sufficient conditions that guarantee the optimality of our trading rules. We also present numerical examples to illustrate.