Financial News
Text2TimeSeries: Enhancing Financial Forecasting through Time Series Prediction Updates with Event-Driven Insights from Large Language Models
Kurisinkel, Litton Jose, Mishra, Pruthwik, Zhang, Yue
Time series models, typically trained on numerical data, are designed to forecast future values. These models often rely on weighted averaging techniques over time intervals. However, real-world time series data is seldom isolated and is frequently influenced by non-numeric factors. For instance, stock price fluctuations are impacted by daily random events in the broader world, with each event exerting a unique influence on price signals. Previously, forecasts in financial markets have been approached in two main ways: either as time-series problems over price sequence or sentiment analysis tasks. The sentiment analysis tasks aim to determine whether news events will have a positive or negative impact on stock prices, often categorizing them into discrete labels. Recognizing the need for a more comprehensive approach to accurately model time series prediction, we propose a collaborative modeling framework that incorporates textual information about relevant events for predictions. Specifically, we leverage the intuition of large language models about future changes to update real number time series predictions. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach on financial market data.
AMA-LSTM: Pioneering Robust and Fair Financial Audio Analysis for Stock Volatility Prediction
Wang, Shengkun, Ji, Taoran, He, Jianfeng, Almutairi, Mariam, Wang, Dan, Wang, Linhan, Zhang, Min, Lu, Chang-Tien
Stock volatility prediction is an important task in the financial industry. Recent advancements in multimodal methodologies, which integrate both textual and auditory data, have demonstrated significant improvements in this domain, such as earnings calls (Earnings calls are public available and often involve the management team of a public company and interested parties to discuss the company's earnings). However, these multimodal methods have faced two drawbacks. First, they often fail to yield reliable models and overfit the data due to their absorption of stochastic information from the stock market. Moreover, using multimodal models to predict stock volatility suffers from gender bias and lacks an efficient way to eliminate such bias. To address these aforementioned problems, we use adversarial training to generate perturbations that simulate the inherent stochasticity and bias, by creating areas resistant to random information around the input space to improve model robustness and fairness. Our comprehensive experiments on two real-world financial audio datasets reveal that this method exceeds the performance of current state-of-the-art solution. This confirms the value of adversarial training in reducing stochasticity and bias for stock volatility prediction tasks.
Improving Realized LGD Approximation: A Novel Framework with XGBoost for Handling Missing Cash-Flow Data
Kostecka, Zuzanna, Ślepaczuk, Robert
The scope for the accurate calculation of the Loss Given Default (LGD) parameter is comprehensive in terms of financial data. In this research, we aim to explore methods for improving the approximation of realized LGD in conditions of limited access to the cash-flow data. We enhance the performance of the method which relies on the differences between exposure values (delta outstanding approach) by employing machine learning (ML) techniques. The research utilizes the data from the mortgage portfolio of one of the European countries and assumes a close resemblance to similar economic contexts. It incorporates non-financial variables and macroeconomic data related to the housing market, improving the accuracy of loss severity approximation. The proposed methodology attempts to mitigate the country-specific (related to the local legal) or portfolio-specific factors in aim to show the general advantage of applying ML techniques, rather than case-specific relation. We developed an XGBoost model that does not rely on cash-flow data yet enhances the accuracy of realized LGD estimation compared to results obtained with the delta outstanding approach. A novel aspect of our work is the detailed exploration of the delta outstanding approach and the methodology for addressing conditions of limited access to cash-flow data through machine learning models.
SoftBank plans to acquire part of Sharp plant in Osaka
Sharp said Friday that it has signed a basic agreement to grant telecommunications carrier SoftBank Corp. exclusive negotiating rights for the partial sale of its Sakai plant in Osaka Prefecture. Sharp will halt production at the Sakai plant by the end of September as it scales down its liquid crystal display business. SoftBank plans to take over about 440,000 square meters, or about 60%, of the plant site and build a large data center for the development of generative artificial intelligence. It aims to start construction this autumn and put the data center into full operation in 2025. The price for the part of the plant site will be decided later. SoftBank plans to operate the data center on its own, while allowing external organizations such as universities and research institutions to use it.
FinGen: A Dataset for Argument Generation in Finance
Chen, Chung-Chi, Takamura, Hiroya, Kobayashi, Ichiro, Miyao, Yusuke
Thinking about the future is one of the important activities that people do in daily life. Futurists also pay a lot of effort into figuring out possible scenarios for the future. We argue that the exploration of this direction is still in an early stage in the NLP research. To this end, we propose three argument generation tasks in the financial application scenario. Our experimental results show these tasks are still big challenges for representative generation models. Based on our empirical results, we further point out several unresolved issues and challenges in this research direction.
Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024
Maslej, Nestor, Fattorini, Loredana, Perrault, Raymond, Parli, Vanessa, Reuel, Anka, Brynjolfsson, Erik, Etchemendy, John, Ligett, Katrina, Lyons, Terah, Manyika, James, Niebles, Juan Carlos, Shoham, Yoav, Wald, Russell, Clark, Jack
The 2024 Index is our most comprehensive to date and arrives at an important moment when AI's influence on society has never been more pronounced. This year, we have broadened our scope to more extensively cover essential trends such as technical advancements in AI, public perceptions of the technology, and the geopolitical dynamics surrounding its development. Featuring more original data than ever before, this edition introduces new estimates on AI training costs, detailed analyses of the responsible AI landscape, and an entirely new chapter dedicated to AI's impact on science and medicine. The AI Index report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI). Our mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data in order for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI. The AI Index is recognized globally as one of the most credible and authoritative sources for data and insights on artificial intelligence. Previous editions have been cited in major newspapers, including the The New York Times, Bloomberg, and The Guardian, have amassed hundreds of academic citations, and been referenced by high-level policymakers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, among other places. This year's edition surpasses all previous ones in size, scale, and scope, reflecting the growing significance that AI is coming to hold in all of our lives.
FinRobot: An Open-Source AI Agent Platform for Financial Applications using Large Language Models
Yang, Hongyang, Zhang, Boyu, Wang, Neng, Guo, Cheng, Zhang, Xiaoli, Lin, Likun, Wang, Junlin, Zhou, Tianyu, Guan, Mao, Zhang, Runjia, Wang, Christina Dan
As financial institutions and professionals increasingly incorporate Large Language Models (LLMs) into their workflows, substantial barriers, including proprietary data and specialized knowledge, persist between the finance sector and the AI community. These challenges impede the AI community's ability to enhance financial tasks effectively. Acknowledging financial analysis's critical role, we aim to devise financial-specialized LLM-based toolchains and democratize access to them through open-source initiatives, promoting wider AI adoption in financial decision-making. In this paper, we introduce FinRobot, a novel open-source AI agent platform supporting multiple financially specialized AI agents, each powered by LLM. Specifically, the platform consists of four major layers: 1) the Financial AI Agents layer that formulates Financial Chain-of-Thought (CoT) by breaking sophisticated financial problems down into logical sequences; 2) the Financial LLM Algorithms layer dynamically configures appropriate model application strategies for specific tasks; 3) the LLMOps and DataOps layer produces accurate models by applying training/fine-tuning techniques and using task-relevant data; 4) the Multi-source LLM Foundation Models layer that integrates various LLMs and enables the above layers to access them directly. Finally, FinRobot provides hands-on for both professional-grade analysts and laypersons to utilize powerful AI techniques for advanced financial analysis. We open-source FinRobot at \url{https://github.com/AI4Finance-Foundation/FinRobot}.
Nvidia's profits soar as AI boom shows no sign of slowing down
Nvidia, the chipmaker at the centre of the boom in artificial intelligence (AI), has reported a seven-fold jump in profit, sending its stock to a record high. The Santa Clara, California-based company said on Wednesday that net income rose to 14.88bn in the first quarter, up from 2.04bn a year earlier. Revenue more than tripled to 26.04bn, well above analysts' forecasts. Nvidia forecast revenue would hit 28bn, plus or minus 2 percent, in the second quarter, also beating analysts' forecasts. Nvidia also announced it would split its stock 10-for-1, effective June 7, to make its shares more accessible, and raise its quarterly dividend by 150 percent to 1 cent per share.
Nvidia reports stratospheric growth as AI boom shows no sign of stopping
Nvidia reported record quarterly revenue Wednesday on the back of the explosion in corporate appetite for artificial intelligence. "The next industrial revolution has begun – companies and countries are partnering with Nvidia … to produce a new commodity: artificial intelligence," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. The company brought in 26bn in revenue in the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, up 18% from Q4 and up 262% from a year ago. Net profit was 14.88bn, up from 2bn a year before. The AI chip maker, whose fortunes are interpreted as a bellwether for the AI transformation under way, reported earnings per share were 5.98, up 21% from the previous quarter and up 629% from a year ago.
Characterizing Multimodal Long-form Summarization: A Case Study on Financial Reports
Cao, Tianyu, Raman, Natraj, Dervovic, Danial, Tan, Chenhao
As large language models (LLMs) expand the power of natural language processing to handle long inputs, rigorous and systematic analyses are necessary to understand their abilities and behavior. A salient application is summarization, due to its ubiquity and controversy (e.g., researchers have declared the death of summarization). In this paper, we use financial report summarization as a case study because financial reports not only are long but also use numbers and tables extensively. We propose a computational framework for characterizing multimodal long-form summarization and investigate the behavior of Claude 2.0/2.1, GPT-4/3.5, and Command. We find that GPT-3.5 and Command fail to perform this summarization task meaningfully. For Claude 2 and GPT-4, we analyze the extractiveness of the summary and identify a position bias in LLMs. This position bias disappears after shuffling the input for Claude, which suggests that Claude has the ability to recognize important information. We also conduct a comprehensive investigation on the use of numeric data in LLM-generated summaries and offer a taxonomy of numeric hallucination. We employ prompt engineering to improve GPT-4's use of numbers with limited success. Overall, our analyses highlight the strong capability of Claude 2 in handling long multimodal inputs compared to GPT-4.