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M.O. Bankov

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Reinforcement Learning for Regime-Dependent Optimal Stopping in Pairs Trading

Bachelor thesis (2026) - M.O. Bankov, F. Yu, F.A. Oliehoek, N. Yorke-Smith
Pairs trading is a strategy that utilises the mean-reverting spread between two correlated assets (stocks). An important factor in such strategies is the market regime, which captures characteristics like trend and volatility of the data, and can shift over time. This paper investigates whether incorporating regime awareness improves the performance of Reinforcement Learning agents for pairs trading entry and exit decisions. Three Double Deep-Q network variants are implemented and compared: a baseline DQN (Deep-Q network), a Recurrent DQN, and a Hidden Markov Model-based DQN that maintains a separate agent per inferred regime. The agents are evaluated on intraday Corn and Wheat futures data, as well as on single-regime generated daily data. Results show that the Recurrent DQN does not significantly improve over the baseline, suggesting it does not implicitly capture regime information. The Markov DQN outperforms the baseline on real data (p = 0.033), while performing worse on generated data, though between-run variance is high in both cases. This supports the hypothesis that explicit regime modelling can benefit pairs trading on real-world data. ...