Optimal trading without optimal control

A hypothetical risk-neutral agent who trades to maximize the expected profit of the next trade will approximately exhibit long-term optimal behavior as long as this agent uses the vector $p = \nabla V (t, x)$ as effective microstructure alphas, where V is the Bellman value function for a smooth relaxation of the problem. Effective microstructure alphas are the steepest-ascent direction of V , equal to the generalized momenta in a dual Hamiltonian formulation. This simple heuristics has wide-rang...