arXiv AI

The Control Layer Behind Rule-Following Agents Trading Across Market Conditions

The paper examines whether four AI trading agents adhered to their predefined strategies and risk rules while trading across various market conditions. Analyzing 2,627 closed positions from February to August 2026, the study found high rule adherence, with agents keeping 97.5% of gross losses within declared stops and maintaining stable risk levels even during a 29% market drawdown. The authors provide an evaluation toolkit that allows traders to distinguish rule-following behavior from luck before allocating capital to such agents.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

What LLM Trading Agents Actually Do in Production: A Six-Month, Population-Scale Record from Two Fleets

The paper reports a six‑month, population‑scale measurement of autonomous language‑model trading agents operating in two production fleets: DX Terminal Pro, with 3,505 user‑funded vaults trading real ETH in Base memecoin markets, and the DXAP live alpha fleet, with 500–599 user‑created agents trading Hyperliquid perpetuals. Across roughly 7.5 million single‑model invocations and 231,638 multi‑tool turns, the study finds that operating layer design, risk sliders, and leaderboard boundaries drive behavior more than strategy text; agents are volatility‑blind in sizing, capture little upside, and show no directional edge compared to a retail benchmark. The analysis includes regression discontinuity, permutation nulls, and a 17‑rule methodology canon to validate the findings.

By T. J. Barton, Chris Constantakis, Patti Hauseman, Annie Mous, Alaska Hoffman, Brian Bergeron, Hunter Goodreau
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

AStockArena: Beyond Returns, Can We Entrust Real Capital to the Decisions of Financial Agents?

AStockArena is a real‑time decision‑auditing benchmark for continuous trading in China’s A‑share market, evaluating 13 open‑ and closed‑source models over 3,198 sequential decisions. The benchmark reconstructs actual account actions by aligning reports, trade requests, execution responses, and account states, then audits them with eight checks covering execution traceability, evidence sufficiency, and financial meta‑awareness. Across 1,070 trading points, 72.99% show at least one audit gap, with evidence gaps most common, and historical replay demonstrates that flagged trades significantly affect portfolio outcomes.

By Zeyu Liu, Sing Kwong Lai, Xuanzhi Feng, HaoYang Shang, Yang Li, Zihao Fang, Xuan Liu
arXiv AI
Oct 28

FIDES-Live: Evaluating Behavioral Concordance in Sequential Trading Agents

FIDES-Live extends the FIDES framework to audit sequential trading agents by separating decision validity, numerical commitment adherence, execution and ledger reconciliation, and receipt‑grounded reporting. In a retrospective audit of 7,299 cryptocurrency account‑rounds and a 310‑round equity pilot, decision validity reached 97.35% and structured reporting accuracy 90.81%, while commitment adherence overall was 94.36% but dropped to 62.63% for non‑empty order proposals. The study shows that all cash and position transitions reconcile with recorded fills, and highlights the need to report concordance, evidence coverage, activity, and financial outcomes separately.

By Arther Tian, Alex Ding, Simon Wu, Aaron Chan
arXiv AI
Jul 1

FinPersona-Bench: A Benchmark for Longitudinal Psychometric Stability of Autonomous Financial Agents

arXiv:2606. 31522v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous financial agents initialized with explicit behavioral mandates such as "preserve capital" or "avoid speculative bets" that are meant to govern every decision throughout deployment.

By Muhammad Usman Safder (Steve), Ayesha Gull (Steve), Rania Elbadry (Steve), Fan Zhang (Steve), Yankai Chen (Steve), Xueqing Peng (Steve), Xue (Steve), Liu, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
arXiv AI
Oct 23

CrashGym: Measuring the Decision Value of Experimentation for LLM Agents in Counterfactual Market Crashes

CrashGym is a deterministic, replayable limit‑order‑book simulator that lets language‑model agents decide between a deleveraging intervention and a liquidity backstop before a market crash. Agents can query intervention experiments in a laboratory version of the market, and their choices are scored by simulating every feasible intervention on an independently seeded target realization, allowing direct regret calculation. In a study of 24 new worlds, laboratory access reduced mean regret by 57.4% for one deployment, and exploratory results suggest lower regret across all evaluated deployments, while an evolving strategy mix offers no clear advantage over a fixed mix.

By Haocheng Lu, Haoxuan Cheng, Mingyang Chen, Minjun Zhu
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Beyond Agent Architecture: Execution Assumptions and Reproducibility in LLM-Based Trading Systems

arXiv:2606. 08285v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) and agentic systems are increasingly proposed for financial trading, yet their reported performance remains difficult to compare because studies vary in data provenance, temporal split discipline, execution timing, turnover treatment, and transaction-cost modeling.

By Junyi Yao, Zihao Zheng
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Can Agentic Trading Systems Pay for Their Own Intelligence?

arXiv:2607. 10286v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used in trading systems, where model reasoning, tool use, and continual decisions incur costs that are expected to produce trading value.

By Qiqi Duan, Changlun Li, Chen Wang, Fan Zhang, Mengxiang Wang, Dayi Miao, Peixian Ma, Jiangpeng Yan, Liyuan Chen, Shuoling Liu, Preslav Nakov, Yuyu Luo, Nan Tang