Stock market indices serve as fundamental market measurement that quantify systematic market dynamics. However, accurate index price prediction remains challenging, primarily because existing approaches treat indices as isolated time series and frame the prediction as a simple regression task. These methods fail to capture indices' inherent nature as aggregations of constituent stocks with complex, time-varying interdependencies. To address these limitations, we propose Cubic, a novel end-to-end framework that explicitly models the adaptive fusion of constituent stocks for index price prediction. Our main contributions are threefold. i) Fusion in the latent space: we introduce the fusion mechanism over the latent embedding of the stocks to extract the information from the vast number of stocks. ii) Binary encoding classification: since regression tasks are challenging due to continuous value estimation, we reformulate the regression into the classification task, where the target value is converted to binary and we optimize the prediction of the value of each digit with cross-entropy loss. iii) Confidence-guided prediction and trading: we introduce the regularization loss to address market prediction uncertainty for the index prediction and design the rule-based trading policies based on the confidence. Extensive experiments across multiple stock markets and indices demonstrate that Cubic consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in stock index prediction tasks, achieving superior performance on both forecasting accuracy metrics and downstream trading profitability.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited notable efficacy in question-answering (QA) tasks across diverse domains. Their prowess in integrating extensive web knowledge has fueled interest in developing LLM-based autonomous agents. While LLMs are efficient in decoding human instructions and deriving solutions by holistically processing historical inputs, transitioning to purpose-driven agents requires a supplementary rational architecture to process multi-source information, establish reasoning chains, and prioritize critical tasks. Addressing this, we introduce \textsc{FinMem}, a novel LLM-based agent framework devised for financial decision-making. It encompasses three core modules: Profiling, to customize the agent's characteristics; Memory, with layered message processing, to aid the agent in assimilating hierarchical financial data; and Decision-making, to convert insights gained from memories into investment decisions. Notably, \textsc{FinMem}'s memory module aligns closely with the cognitive structure of human traders, offering robust interpretability and real-time tuning. Its adjustable cognitive span allows for the retention of critical information beyond human perceptual limits, thereby enhancing trading outcomes. This framework enables the agent to self-evolve its professional knowledge, react agilely to new investment cues, and continuously refine trading decisions in the volatile financial environment. We first compare \textsc{FinMem} with various algorithmic agents on a scalable real-world financial dataset, underscoring its leading trading performance in stocks. We then fine-tuned the agent's perceptual span and character setting to achieve a significantly enhanced trading performance. Collectively, \textsc{FinMem} presents a cutting-edge LLM agent framework for automated trading, boosting cumulative investment returns.

Originally published on Towards AI the World's Leading AI and Technology News and Media Company. If you are building an AI-related product or service, we invite you to consider becoming an AI sponsor. At Towards AI, we help scale AI and technology startups. Let us help you unleash your technology to the masses. This article is written by Berend Gort & Bruce Yang, core team members of the Open-Source project AI4Finance. This project is an open-source community sharing AI tools for finance, and a part of the Columbia University in New York. Our previous article described the Combinatorial PurgedKFold Cross-Validation method in detail for classifiers (or regressors) with regular predictions.

We suggest a simple practical method to combine the human and artificial intelligence to both learn best investment practices of fund managers, and provide recommendations to improve them. Our approach is based on a combination of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) and RL. First, the IRL component learns the intent of fund managers as suggested by their trading history, and recovers their implied reward function. At the second step, this reward function is used by a direct RL algorithm to optimize asset allocation decisions. We show that our method is able to improve over the performance of individual fund managers.