The paper examines whether benign overfitting—where highly overparameterized models still predict well—occurs in equity return prediction. It finds a double‑descent risk curve for ridgeless models and shows that while ridge regularization slightly improves performance, the advantage vanishes at high parameter‑to‑observation ratios. Ultimately, both models fail to beat a simple historical average, indicating that standard equity predictors lack genuine forecasting power even with flexible machine learning methods.
arXiv:2606. 04576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) is important for managing financial risks effectively.
arXiv:2309. 15769v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in deep learning have highlighted the phenomenon of benign overfitting in overparameterized statistical models, sparking significant interest in understanding its foundations.
The paper demonstrates that residual learning enables neural network models in asset pricing to become deeper while preserving and refining shallow counterparts. Deep residual models achieve a higher out‑of‑sample Sharpe ratio (2.07) compared to shallow models (1.92) and significantly outperform deep feedforward models (0.89). This suggests that model depth can add economic value and offers a scalable approach for large asset pricing models.
arXiv:2608. 07281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates the asymptotic behavior of the out-of-sample prediction risk of the high-dimensional ridgeless least-squares estimator when the feature dimension $p$ and the sample size $n$ grow proportionally.
The paper explores tabular deep learning for equity signal generation, training five model classes on daily data from about 300 large‑cap US stocks over eleven years. By using Bayesian optimisation that targets trading performance across three distinct market regimes, the authors achieve regime‑robust hyperparameter selection, yielding out‑of‑sample signal precision above random and a Hybrid ensemble (XGBoost + TabNet) with an annualised return of 51.26% and a Sharpe ratio of 2.44. The study also finds that alternative data adds limited value beyond technical and fundamental features, and that the ensemble’s outperformance is driven by stock selection rather than market exposure.
arXiv:2608. 27076v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Algorithmic trading now represents a market exceeding $20 billion, where even marginal gains in signal robustness can translate into economically significant returns.
Time-series forecasting research has been moving steadily toward larger architectures, from specialized transformers to general-purpose foundation models, on the assumption that capacity is what unlocks accuracy. We take the opposite position: most of the gap can be closed at far lower cost by tuning preprocessing rather than scaling models.
arXiv:2605.28853v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Portfolio optimization in real-world financial markets is notoriously difficult due to non-stationarity, noisy data, and high transaction cos...
arXiv:2109.02355v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The last decade of progress in machine learning (ML), especially the deep learning era, has raised a number of scientific questions that challenge...
arXiv:2609.36061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In quantitative finance, standard regression losses are misaligned with the economics of return prediction. As the conditional mean of financial log-re...
arXiv:2603.01820v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Forecasting financial asset returns is challenging due to low signal-to-noise ratios, non-stationarity and heavy-tailed distributions. We ben...
arXiv:2610.07006v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning effective representations helps characterize the structure and dynamics of equity markets from financial data with a low signal-to-noise ratio...