Yuehua Tang

Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Yuehua Tang

We document the capability of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to predict stock market reactions from news headlines without direct financial training. Using post-knowledge-cutoff headlines, GPT-4 captures initial market responses, achieving approximately 90% portfolio-day hit rates for the non-tradable initial reaction. GPT-4 scores also significantly predict the subsequent drift, especially for small stocks and negative news. Forecasting ability generally increases with model size, suggesting that financial reasoning is an emerging capacity of complex LLMs. Strategy returns decline as LLM adoption rises, consistent with improved price efficiency. To rationalize these findings, we develop a theoretical model that incorporates LLM technology, information-processing capacity constraints, underreaction, and limits to arbitrage.

Xueqing Peng, Zhuohan Xie, Yupeng Cao et al.

As AI agents improve, the central question is no longer whether they can solve isolated well-defined financial tasks, but whether they can reliably carry out financial professional work. Existing financial benchmarks offer only a partial view of this ability, as they primarily evaluate static competencies such as question answering, retrieval, summarization, and classification. We introduce Herculean, the first skilled benchmark for agentic financial intelligence spanning four representative workflows, including Trading, Hedging, Market Insights, and Auditing. Each workflow is instantiated as a standardized MCP-based skill environment with its own tools, interaction dynamics, constraints, and success criteria, enabling consistent end-to-end assessment of heterogeneous agent systems. Across frontier agents, we find agents perform relatively well on Trading and Market Insights, but struggle substantially on Hedging and Auditing, where long-horizon coordination, state consistency, and structured verification are critical. Overall, our results point to a key gap in current agents in turning financial reasoning into dependable workflow execution in high-stakes financial workflows.