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.
By Hui Guo, Jiawei Huang, Runze Li, Yan Yu
arXiv:2606. 03184v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Financial forecasting is difficult due to low signal-to-noise ratios, latent factors, heavy tails, regime shifts, and jumps.
By Jiaze Sun, Kelvin J. L. Koa, Ruiyang Ni, Yize Liu, Haonan Chen, Ke-Wei Huang
arXiv:2606. 09104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) frameworks for portfolio optimization have shown promise for their ability to learn allocation rules dynamically from market data.
By Daniil Mikriukov (University of Liverpool, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Ruoyu Sun (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Angelos Stefanidis (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Jionglong Su (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Zhengyong Jiang (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University)
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...
By Rahul Fernandes, Travis Desell
EXAONE Forecast for Finance (EXAONE Finance) is a financial time‑series foundation model designed to overcome the limitations of existing models that rely on self‑attention and assume fully observed data. It replaces self‑attention with a causal 1D convolution for temporal mixing and a group‑aware pooling MLP for variate mixing, achieving linear‑time complexity. The model is pretrained on a large, diverse financial corpus and, through masked context augmentation, learns to handle missing data, ultimately topping the FinVerse benchmark across accuracy, ranking, and profitability metrics.
By Seunghan Lee, Jaehoon Lee, Jun Seo, Tae Yoon Lim, Dongwan Kang, Hwanil Choi, Minjae Kim, Sungdong Yoo, Junhyeok Kang, Sangjun Han, Soonyoung Lee, Wonbin Ahn
arXiv:2609.04239v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: This technical report presents EXAONE Forecast for Finance (EXAONE Finance), a financial time series foundation model (TSFM) tailored to financial...
By Seunghan Lee, Jaehoon Lee, Jun Seo, Tae Yoon Lim, Dongwan Kang, Hwanil Choi, Minjae Kim, Sungdong Yoo, Junhyeok Kang, Sangjun Han, Soonyoung Lee, Wonbin Ahn