The advent of financial technology has witnessed a surge in the utilization of deep learning models to anticipate consumer conduct, a trend that has demonstrated considerable potential in enhancing lending strategies and bolstering market efficiency. We study multi-horizon demand forecasting on e-commerce transactions using the UCI Online Retail II dataset. Unlike prior versions of this manuscript that mixed financial-loan narratives with retail data, we focus exclusively on retail market behavior and define a clear prediction target: per SKU daily demand (or revenue) for horizons H=1,7,14. We present a hybrid sequence model that combines multi-scale temporal convolutions, a gated recurrent module, and time-aware self-attention. The model is trained with standard regression losses and evaluated under MAE, RMSE, sMAPE, MASE, and Theil's U_2 with strict time-based splits to prevent leakage. We benchmark against ARIMA/Prophet, LSTM/GRU, LightGBM, and state-of-the-art Transformer forecasters (TFT, Informer, Autoformer, N-BEATS). Results show consistent accuracy gains and improved robustness on peak/holiday periods. We further provide ablations and statistical significance tests to ensure the reliability of improvements, and we release implementation details to facilitate reproducibility.

Linear Regression (LR), and Support V ector Machine (SVM) are the ML algorithms in comparison. We use data from Dow Jones 30 constituent stocks to construct the environment.

Market making is a popular trading strategy, which aims to generate profit from the spread between the quotes posted at either side of the market. It has been shown that training market makers (MMs) with adversarial reinforcement learning allows to overcome the risks due to changing market conditions and to lead to robust performances. Prior work assumes, however, that MMs keep quoting throughout the trading process, but in practice this is not required, even for ``registered'' MMs (that only need to satisfy quoting ratios defined by the market rules). In this paper, we build on this line of work and enrich the strategy space of the MM by allowing to occasionally not quote or provide single-sided quotes. Towards this end, in addition to the MM agents that provide continuous bid-ask quotes, we have designed two new agents with increasingly richer action spaces. The first has the option to provide bid-ask quotes or refuse to quote. The second has the option to provide bid-ask quotes, refuse to quote, or only provide single-sided ask or bid quotes. We employ a model-driven approach to empirically compare the performance of the continuously quoting MM with the two agents above in various types of adversarial environments. We demonstrate how occasional refusal to provide bid-ask quotes improves returns and/or Sharpe ratios. The quoting ratios of well-trained MMs can basically meet any market requirements, reaching up to 99.9$\%$ in some cases.

High-frequency trading (HFT) is an investing strategy that continuously monitors market states and places bid and ask orders at millisecond speeds. Traditional HFT approaches fit models with historical data and assume that future market states follow similar patterns. This limits the effectiveness of any single model to the specific conditions it was trained for. Additionally, these models achieve optimal solutions only under specific market conditions, such as assumptions about stock price's stochastic process, stable order flow, and the absence of sudden volatility. Real-world markets, however, are dynamic, diverse, and frequently volatile. To address these challenges, we propose the FlowHFT, a novel imitation learning framework based on flow matching policy. FlowHFT simultaneously learns strategies from numerous expert models, each proficient in particular market scenarios. As a result, our framework can adaptively adjust investment decisions according to the prevailing market state. Furthermore, FlowHFT incorporates a grid-search fine-tuning mechanism. This allows it to refine strategies and achieve superior performance even in complex or extreme market scenarios where expert strategies may be suboptimal. We test FlowHFT in multiple market environments. We first show that flow matching policy is applicable in stochastic market environments, thus enabling FlowHFT to learn trading strategies under different market conditions. Notably, our single framework consistently achieves performance superior to the best expert for each market condition.

Market simulator tries to create high-quality synthetic financial data that mimics real-world market dynamics, which is crucial for model development and robust assessment. Despite continuous advancements in simulation methodologies, market fluctuations vary in terms of scale and sources, but existing frameworks often excel in only specific tasks. To address this challenge, we propose Financial Wind Tunnel (FWT), a retrieval-augmented market simulator designed to generate controllable, reasonable, and adaptable market dynamics for model testing. FWT offers a more comprehensive and systematic generative capability across different data frequencies. By leveraging a retrieval method to discover cross-sectional information as the augmented condition, our diffusion-based simulator seamlessly integrates both macro- and micro-level market patterns. Furthermore, our framework allows the simulation to be controlled with wide applicability, including causal generation through "what-if" prompts or unprecedented cross-market trend synthesis. Additionally, we develop an automated optimizer for downstream quantitative models, using stress testing of simulated scenarios via FWT to enhance returns while controlling risks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach enables the generalizable and reliable market simulation, significantly improve the performance and adaptability of downstream models, particularly in highly complex and volatile market conditions. Our code and data sample is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/fwt_-E852

Recent advancements have underscored the potential of large language model (LLM)-based agents in financial decision-making. Despite this progress, the field currently encounters two main challenges: (1) the lack of a comprehensive LLM agent framework adaptable to a variety of financial tasks, and (2) the absence of standardized benchmarks and consistent datasets for assessing agent performance. To tackle these issues, we introduce \textsc{InvestorBench}, the first benchmark specifically designed for evaluating LLM-based agents in diverse financial decision-making contexts. InvestorBench enhances the versatility of LLM-enabled agents by providing a comprehensive suite of tasks applicable to different financial products, including single equities like stocks, cryptocurrencies and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Additionally, we assess the reasoning and decision-making capabilities of our agent framework using thirteen different LLMs as backbone models, across various market environments and tasks. Furthermore, we have curated a diverse collection of open-source, multi-modal datasets and developed a comprehensive suite of environments for financial decision-making. This establishes a highly accessible platform for evaluating financial agents' performance across various scenarios.

We study how experience with asset price bubbles changes the trading strategies of reinforcement learning (RL) traders and ask whether the change in trading strategies helps to prevent future bubbles. We train the RL traders in a multi-agent market simulation platform, ABIDES, and compare the strategies of traders trained with and without bubble experience. We find that RL traders without bubble experience behave like short-term momentum traders, whereas traders with bubble experience behave like value traders. Therefore, RL traders without bubble experience amplify bubbles, whereas RL traders with bubble experience tend to suppress and sometimes prevent them. This finding suggests that learning from experience is a mechanism for a boom and bust cycle where the experience of a collapsing bubble makes future bubbles less likely for a period of time until the memory fades and bubbles become more likely to form again.

In the online innovation market, the fund-raising performance of the start-up project is a concerning issue for creators, investors and platforms. Unfortunately, existing studies always focus on modeling the fund-raising process after the publishment of a project but the predicting of a project attraction in the market before setting up is largely unexploited. Usually, this prediction is always with great challenges to making a comprehensive understanding of both the start-up project and market environment. To that end, in this paper, we present a focused study on this important problem from a market graph perspective. Specifically, we propose a Graph-based Market Environment (GME) model for predicting the fund-raising performance of the unpublished project by exploiting the market environment. In addition, we discriminatively model the project competitiveness and market preferences by designing two graph-based neural network architectures and incorporating them into a joint optimization stage. Furthermore, to explore the information propagation problem with dynamic environment in a large-scale market graph, we extend the GME model with parallelizing competitiveness quantification and hierarchical propagation algorithm. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world data. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Standard methods and theories in finance can be ill-equipped to capture highly non-linear interactions in financial prediction problems based on large-scale datasets, with deep learning offering a way to gain insights into correlations in markets as complex systems. In this paper, we apply deep learning to econometrically constructed gradients to learn and exploit lagged correlations among S&P 500 stocks to compare model behaviour in stable and volatile market environments, and under the exclusion of target stock information for predictions. In order to measure the effect of time horizons, we predict intraday and daily stock price movements in varying interval lengths and gauge the complexity of the problem at hand with a modification of our model architecture. Our findings show that accuracies, while remaining significant and demonstrating the exploitability of lagged correlations in stock markets, decrease with shorter prediction horizons. We discuss implications for modern finance theory and our work's applicability as an investigative tool for portfolio managers. Lastly, we show that our model's performance is consistent in volatile markets by exposing it to the environment of the recent financial crisis of 2007/2008.