An Emerging Retail Portfolio Management Application: Personalized, Tax-Aware Reinforcement Learning with Natural Language Goals

Abstract:Retail investors lack access to the kind of personalized, tax-aware portfolio management that institutional clients take for granted -- existing robo-advisors use static, rule-based allocation, and institutional-grade systems require account minimums and technology stacks unavailable to individual investors. We present a fully built, integration-tested application that closes this gap: a FastAPI backend and web dashboard that let a user describe an investment goal in plain language (e.g. "I want steady growth but need to sell some shares next month for a down payment"), routes that goal to one of six investment mandates, and produces a live, broker-integrated portfolio recommendation from athree-phase reinforcement learning system -- a self-supervised cross-asset encoder, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) allocation policy with a learned intent router, and a lightweight LoRA adapter that personalizes recommendations from an individual's revealed brokerage behavior without retraining the shared model. The system is functionally complete and integration-tested end-to-end against a live brokerage API (Alpaca, paper-trading mode), including multi-user authentication, a trust first preview-before-apply confirmation flow, daily email digests, and an auditable action-integrity chain, but has not yet been opened to real end-users; we report this honestly as an emerging, pre-deployment application with a concrete path to full deployment, alongside 14-day walk-forward backtests (bootstrapped confidence intervals included) as preliminary, pre-deployment validation rather than production performance. We also report several practical engineering lessons -- silently-inactive integration paths, hanging third-party API calls, and the value of end-to-end empirical verification over trusting checkpoint metadata -- that we believe generalize to other applied RL systems built on external, live data sources.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)

arXiv:2608.05255 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2608.05255v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.05255 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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