Asset Pricing in Pre-trained Transformer

Abstract

This paper proposes an innovative Transformer model, Single-directional representative from Transformer (SERT), for US large capital stock pricing. It also innovatively applies the pre-trained Transformer models under the stock pricing and factor investment context. They are compared with standard Transformer models and encoder-only Transformer models in three periods covering the entire COVID-19 pandemic to examine the model adaptivity and suitability during the extreme market fluctuations. Namely, pre-COVID-19 period, COVID-19 period and 1-year post-COVID-19. The best proposed SERT model achieves the highest out-of-sample $R^2$, 11.94\% and 11.47\% respectively, when extreme market fluctuation takes place, followed by pre-trained Transformer models (11.13\% and 9.72\%). Their Trend-following-based strategy's performance also proves their excellent capability for hedging downside risks during market shocks. The proposed SERT model achieves a Sortino ratio 47\% higher than the buy-and-hold benchmark in the equal-weighted portfolio and 28\% higher in the value-weighted portfolio in the static transaction cost scenario when the pandemic period is considered. It proves that Transformer models have a strong ability to capture patterns of temporal sparsity in asset pricing factor models, especially with high volatility. I also find the softmax signal filter as the common configuration of Transformer models in alternative contexts, which only eliminates differences between models, but does not improve strategy-wise performance, while increasing attention heads improves the model performance insignificantly and applying the 'layer normalization first' method does not boost the model performance in our case.

67 pages,25 figures, 13 tables