Stock price prediction is challenging due to market volatility and its sensitivity to real-time events. While large language models (LLMs) offer new avenues for text-based forecasting, their application in finance is hindered by noisy news data and the lack of explicit answers in text. General-purpose memory architectures struggle to identify the key drivers of price movements. To address this, we propose StockMem, an event-reflection dual-layer memory framework. It structures news into events and mines them along two dimensions: horizontal consolidation integrates daily events, while longitudinal tracking captures event evolution to extract incremental information reflecting market expectation discrepancies. This builds a temporal event knowledge base. By analyzing event-price dynamics, the framework further forms a reflection knowledge base of causal experiences. For prediction, it retrieves analogous historical scenarios and reasons with current events, incremental data, and past experiences. Experiments show StockMem outperforms existing memory architectures and provides superior, explainable reasoning by tracing the information chain affecting prices, enhancing decision transparency in financial forecasting.

Transformer models have become increasingly popular in financial applications, yet their potential risk making and biases remain under-explored. The purpose of this work is to audit the reliance of the model on volatile data for decision-making, and quantify how the frequency of price movements affects the model's prediction confidence. We employ a transformer model for prediction, and introduce a metric based on Partial Information Decomposition (PID) to measure the influence of each asset on the model's decision making. Our analysis reveals two key observations: first, the model disregards data volatility entirely, and second, it is biased toward data with lower-frequency price movements.

This study presents the implementation of a short-term forecasting system for price movements in exchange markets, using market depth data and a systematic procedure to enable a fully automated trading system. The case study focuses on the UK to Win Horse Racing market during the pre-live stage on the world's leading betting exchange, Betfair. Innovative convolutional attention mechanisms are introduced and applied to multiple recurrent neural networks and bi-dimensional convolutional recurrent neural network layers. Additionally, a novel padding method for convolutional layers is proposed, specifically designed for multivariate time series processing. These innovations are thoroughly detailed, along with their execution process. The proposed architectures follow a standard supervised learning approach, involving model training and subsequent testing on new data, which requires extensive pre-processing and data analysis. The study also presents a complete end-to-end framework for automated feature engineering and market interactions using the developed models in production. The key finding of this research is that all proposed innovations positively impact the performance metrics of the classification task under examination, thereby advancing the current state-of-the-art in convolutional attention mechanisms and padding methods applied to multivariate time series problems.

The intricate dynamics of stock markets have led to extensive research on models that are able to effectively explain their inherent complexities. This study leverages the econometrics literature to explore the dynamic factor model as an interpretable model with sufficient predictive capabilities for capturing essential market phenomena. Although the model has been extensively applied for predictive purposes, this study focuses on analyzing the extracted loadings and common factors as an alternative framework for understanding stock price dynamics. The results reveal novel insights into traditional market theories when applied to the Philippine Stock Exchange using the Kalman method and maximum likelihood estimation, with subsequent validation against the capital asset pricing model. Notably, a one-factor model extracts a common factor representing systematic or market dynamics similar to the composite index, whereas a two-factor model extracts common factors representing market trends and volatility. Furthermore, an application of the model for nowcasting the growth rates of the Philippine gross domestic product highlights the potential of the extracted common factors as viable real-time market indicators, yielding over a 34% decrease in the out-of-sample prediction error. Overall, the results underscore the value of dynamic factor analysis in gaining a deeper understanding of market price movement dynamics.

Accurately predicting short-term stock price movement remains a challenging task due to the market's inherent volatility and sensitivity to investor sentiment. This paper discusses a deep learning framework that integrates emotion features extracted from tweet data with historical stock price information to forecast significant price changes on the following day. We utilize Meta's Llama 3.1-8B-Instruct model to preprocess tweet data, thereby enhancing the quality of emotion features derived from three emotion analysis approaches: a transformer-based DistilRoBERTa classifier from the Hugging Face library and two lexicon-based methods using National Research Council Canada (NRC) resources. These features are combined with previous-day stock price data to train a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model. Experimental results on TSLA, AAPL, and AMZN stocks show that all three emotion analysis methods improve the average accuracy for predicting significant price movements, compared to the baseline model using only historical stock prices, which yields an accuracy of 13.5%. The DistilRoBERTa-based stock prediction model achieves the best performance, with accuracy rising from 23.6% to 38.5% when using LLaMA-enhanced emotion analysis. These results demonstrate that using large language models to preprocess tweet content enhances the effectiveness of emotion analysis which in turn improves the accuracy of predicting significant stock price movements.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) has ushered in a new era of permissionless financial innovation--but also opened the door to discourse-driven market manipulation at unprecedented scale. Without centralized gatekeepers or regulatory oversight, malicious actors now coordinate shilling campaigns and pump-and-dump schemes across social platforms and on-chain ecosystems. We propose Hide-and-Shill, a novel Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework for decentralized manipulation detection. By modeling the interaction between manipulators and detectors as a dynamic adversarial game, the framework learns to identify suspicious discourse patterns using delayed token price reactions as ground-truth financial signals. Our method introduces three key innovations: (1) Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to improve learning stability in sparse-reward and partially observable settings; (2) a theory-grounded reward function inspired by rational expectations and information asymmetry, distinguishing price discovery from manipulation-induced noise; and (3) a multi-modal agent pipeline that fuses LLM-based semantic features, social graph signals, and on-chain market data for informed decision-making. T o support scalable and trustless deployment, our framework is integrated within the Symphony system--a decentralized multi-agent coordination architecture that enables peer-to-peer agent execution, trust-aware learning through distributed logs, and chain-verifiable evaluation. Symphony facilitates adversarial co-evolution among strategic actors and maintains robust manipulation detection without reliance on centralized oracles, empowering real-time surveillance across global DeFi discourse ecosystems. Trained on 100,000 real-world discourse episodes and validated in adversarial co-evolution simulations, Hide-and-Shill achieves state-of-the-art performance in both detection accuracy and causal attribution.

As cryptocurrencies gain popularity, the digital asset marketplace becomes increasingly significant. Understanding social media signals offers valuable insights into investor sentiment and market dynamics. Prior research has predominantly focused on text-based platforms such as Twitter. However, video content remains underexplored, despite potentially containing richer emotional and contextual sentiment that is not fully captured by text alone. In this study, we present a multimodal analysis comparing TikTok and Twitter sentiment, using large language models to extract insights from both video and text data. We investigate the dynamic dependencies and spillover effects between social media sentiment and cryptocurrency market indicators. Our results reveal that TikTok's video-based sentiment significantly influences speculative assets and short-term market trends, while Twitter's text-based sentiment aligns more closely with long-term dynamics. Notably, the integration of cross-platform sentiment signals improves forecasting accuracy by up to 20%.

Cryptocurrency markets are experiencing rapid growth, but this expansion comes with significant challenges, particularly in predicting cryptocurrency prices for traders in the U.S. In this study, we explore how deep learning and machine learning models can be used to forecast the closing prices of the XRP/USDT trading pair. While many existing cryptocurrency prediction models focus solely on price and volume patterns, they often overlook market liquidity, a crucial factor in price predictability. To address this, we introduce two important liquidity proxy metrics: the Volume-To-Volatility Ratio (VVR) and the Volume-Weighted Average Price (VWAP). These metrics provide a clearer understanding of market stability and liquidity, ultimately enhancing the accuracy of our price predictions. We developed four machine learning models, Linear Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, and LSTM neural networks, using historical data without incorporating the liquidity proxy metrics, and evaluated their performance. We then retrained the models, including the liquidity proxy metrics, and reassessed their performance. In both cases (with and without the liquidity proxies), the LSTM model consistently outperformed the others. These results underscore the importance of considering market liquidity when predicting cryptocurrency closing prices. Therefore, incorporating these liquidity metrics is essential for more accurate forecasting models. Our findings offer valuable insights for traders and developers seeking to create smarter and more risk-aware strategies in the U.S. digital assets market.

This thesis presents the results of a comprehensive research project focused on applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to the problem of market making in financial markets. Market makers (MMs) play a fundamental role in providing liquidity, yet face significant challenges arising from inventory risk, competition, and non-stationary market dynamics. This research explores how RL, particularly Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), can be employed to develop autonomous, adaptive, and profitable market making strategies. The study begins by formulating the MM task as a reinforcement learning problem, designing agents capable of operating in both single-agent and multi-agent settings within a simulated financial environment. It then addresses the complex issue of inventory management using two complementary approaches: reward engineering and Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL). While the former uses dynamic reward shaping to guide behavior, the latter leverages Pareto front optimization to explicitly balance competing objectives. To address the problem of non-stationarity, the research introduces POW-dTS, a novel policy weighting algorithm based on Discounted Thompson Sampling. This method allows agents to dynamically select and combine pretrained policies, enabling continual adaptation to shifting market conditions. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RL-based approaches significantly outperform traditional and baseline algorithmic strategies across various performance metrics. Overall, this research thesis contributes new methodologies and insights for the design of robust, efficient, and adaptive market making agents, reinforcing the potential of RL to transform algorithmic trading in complex financial systems.

Support and resistance (SR) levels are central to technical analysis, guiding traders in entry, exit, and risk management. Despite widespread use, traditional SR identification methods often fail to adapt to the complexities of modern, volatile markets. Recent research has introduced machine learning techniques to address the following challenges, yet most focus on price prediction rather than structural level identification. This paper presents DeepSupp, a new deep learning approach for detecting financial support levels using multi-head attention mechanisms to analyze spatial correlations and market microstructure relationships. Deep-Supp integrates advanced feature engineering, constructing dynamic correlation matrices that capture evolving market relationships, and employs an attention-based autoencoder for robust representation learning. The final support levels are extracted through unsupervised clustering, leveraging DBSCAN to identify significant price thresholds. Comprehensive evaluations on S&P 500 tickers demonstrate that DeepSupp outperforms six baseline methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across six financial metrics, including essential support accuracy and market regime sensitivity. With consistent results across diverse market conditions, DeepSupp addresses critical gaps in SR level detection, offering a scalable and reliable solution for modern financial analysis. Our approach highlights the potential of attention-based architectures to uncover nuanced market patterns and improve technical trading strategies.