We propose an approach to generate realistic and high-fidelity stock market data based on generative adversarial networks.
 We model the order stream as a stochastic process with finite history dependence, and employ a conditional Wasserstein GAN to capture history dependence of orders in a stock market. 
 We test our approach with actual market and synthetic data on a number of different statistics, and find the generated data to be close to real data. Financial markets are among the most well-studied and closely watched complex multiagent systems in existence. Well-functioning financial markets are critical to the operation of a complex global economy, and small changes in the efficiency or stability of such markets can have enormous ramifications. Accurate modeling of financial markets can support improved design and regulation of these critical institutions. There is a vast literature on financial market modeling, though still a large gap between the state-of-art and the ideal. Analytic approaches provide insight through highly stylized model forms. Agent-based models accommodate greater dynamic complexity, and are often able to reproduce "stylized facts" of real-world markets BID10 . Currently lacking, however, is a simulation capable of producing market data at high fidelity and high realism. Our aim is to develop such a model, to support a range of market design and analysis problems. This work provides a first step, learning a high-fidelity generator from real stock market data streams.Our main contribution is an approach to produce stock market data that is close to real market data, using a Wasserstein generative adversarial network (WGAN) . There are many challenges that we overcome as part of this contribution. The first is how to represent a stream of stock market orders as data that can be used in a WGAN. Towards this end, we assume the stock market data stream to arise from a stochastic process with finite (but long) memory dependence. The stochastic process view also makes precise the conditional distribution that the generator is learning as well the joint distribution that the critic of the WGAN distinguishes by estimating the earth-mover distance.The second main challenge is the design of the network architecture. We choose a conditional WGAN to capture the history dependence of the stochastic process, with both the generator and critic conditional on history of orders and the time of day. A single LSTM layer is used to summarize the history succinctly. The internal architecture of both the generator and critic uses a standard convolutional structure. The generator outputs the next stock market order as well as how this order changes the active orders in the market. Part of the generator output, which updates the active market orders, is produced using a pre-trained network to approximate the deterministic buy and sell order matching in the stock market.Finally, we experiment with synthetic and real market data. The synthetic data is produced using a stock market simulator that has been used in several agent-based financial studies. The real data was obtained from OneMarketData, a financial data provider and publisher of the OneTick database product. We evaluate the generated data using various statistics such as the distribution of price and quantity of orders, inter-arrival times of orders, and the best bid and best ask evolution over time. We find the generated data matches the corresponding statistics in real data (simulated or actual stock market) closely. Our results reveal that GANs can be used to simulate a stock market. While our results are promising, there are open issues that provide for further research material. One experimental aspect is to try different size of the network in the WGAN, possibly dependent on the data size of the given stock and testing with many different variety of stocks. Another open research issue is to output cancellations in a more intelligent manner than the heuristic approach we use now. Overall, our work provides fertile ground for future research at the intersection of deep learning and finance.
We propose an approach to generate realistic and high-fidelity stock market data based on generative adversarial networks.
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