Time-consistent portfolio selection with strictly monotone mean-variance preference ArXiv ID: 2502.11052 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This paper is devoted to time-consistent control problems of portfolio selection with strictly monotone mean-variance preferences. These preferences are variational modifications of the conventional mean-variance preferences, and remain time-inconsistent as in mean-variance optimization problems. To tackle the time-inconsistency, we study the Nash equilibrium controls of both the open-loop type and the closed-loop type, and characterize them within a random parameter setting. The problem is reduced to solving a flow of forward-backward stochastic differential equations for open-loop equilibria, and to solving extended Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations for closed-loop equilibria. In particular, we derive semi-closed-form solutions for these two types of equilibria under a deterministic parameter setting. Both solutions are represented by the same function, which is independent of wealth state and random path. This function can be expressed as the conventional time-consistent mean-variance portfolio strategy multiplied by a factor greater than one. Furthermore, we find that the state-independent closed-loop Nash equilibrium control is a strong equilibrium strategy in a constant parameter setting only when the interest rate is sufficiently large. ...

A Distillation-based Future-aware Graph Neural Network for Stock Trend Prediction ArXiv ID: 2502.10776 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Stock trend prediction involves forecasting the future price movements by analyzing historical data and various market indicators. With the advancement of machine learning, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been extensively employed in stock prediction due to their powerful capability to capture spatiotemporal dependencies of stocks. However, despite the efforts of various GNN stock predictors to enhance predictive performance, the improvements remain limited, as they focus solely on analyzing historical spatiotemporal dependencies, overlooking the correlation between historical and future patterns. In this study, we propose a novel distillation-based future-aware GNN framework (DishFT-GNN) for stock trend prediction. Specifically, DishFT-GNN trains a teacher model and a student model, iteratively. The teacher model learns to capture the correlation between distribution shifts of historical and future data, which is then utilized as intermediate supervision to guide the student model to learn future-aware spatiotemporal embeddings for accurate prediction. Through extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, we verify the state-of-the-art performance of DishFT-GNN. ...

Price manipulation schemes of new crypto-tokens in decentralized exchanges ArXiv ID: 2502.10512 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Blockchain technology has revolutionized financial markets by enabling decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that operate without intermediaries. Uniswap V2, a leading DEX, facilitates the rapid creation and trading of new tokens, which offer high return potential but exposing investors to significant risks. In this work, we analyze the financial impact of newly created tokens, assessing their market dynamics, profitability and liquidity manipulations. Our findings reveal that a significant portion of market liquidity is trapped in honeypots, reducing market efficiency and misleading investors. Applying a simple buy-and-hold strategy, we are able to uncover some major risks associated with investing in newly created tokens, including the widespread presence of rug pulls and sandwich attacks. We extract the optimal sandwich amount, revealing that their proliferation in new tokens stems from higher profitability in low-liquidity pools. Furthermore, we analyze the fundamental differences between token price evolution in swap time and physical time. Using clustering techniques, we highlight these differences and identify typical patterns of honeypot and sellable tokens. Our study provides insights into the risks and financial dynamics of decentralized markets and their challenges for investors. ...

LOB-Bench: Benchmarking Generative AI for Finance – an Application to Limit Order Book Data ArXiv ID: 2502.09172 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract While financial data presents one of the most challenging and interesting sequence modelling tasks due to high noise, heavy tails, and strategic interactions, progress in this area has been hindered by the lack of consensus on quantitative evaluation paradigms. To address this, we present LOB-Bench, a benchmark, implemented in python, designed to evaluate the quality and realism of generative message-by-order data for limit order books (LOB) in the LOBSTER format. Our framework measures distributional differences in conditional and unconditional statistics between generated and real LOB data, supporting flexible multivariate statistical evaluation. The benchmark also includes features commonly used LOB statistics such as spread, order book volumes, order imbalance, and message inter-arrival times, along with scores from a trained discriminator network. Lastly, LOB-Bench contains “market impact metrics”, i.e. the cross-correlations and price response functions for specific events in the data. We benchmark generative autoregressive state-space models, a (C)GAN, as well as a parametric LOB model and find that the autoregressive GenAI approach beats traditional model classes. ...

Quantifying Cryptocurrency Unpredictability: A Comprehensive Study of Complexity and Forecasting ArXiv ID: 2502.09079 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This paper offers a thorough examination of the univariate predictability in cryptocurrency time-series. By exploiting a combination of complexity measure and model predictions we explore the cryptocurrencies time-series forecasting task focusing on the exchange rate in USD of Litecoin, Binance Coin, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP. On one hand, to assess the complexity and the randomness of these time-series, a comparative analysis has been performed using Brownian and colored noises as a benchmark. The results obtained from the Complexity-Entropy causality plane and power density spectrum analysis reveal that cryptocurrency time-series exhibit characteristics closely resembling those of Brownian noise when analyzed in a univariate context. On the other hand, the application of a wide range of statistical, machine and deep learning models for time-series forecasting demonstrates the low predictability of cryptocurrencies. Notably, our analysis reveals that simpler models such as Naive models consistently outperform the more complex machine and deep learning ones in terms of forecasting accuracy across different forecast horizons and time windows. The combined study of complexity and forecasting accuracies highlights the difficulty of predicting the cryptocurrency market. These findings provide valuable insights into the inherent characteristics of the cryptocurrency data and highlight the need to reassess the challenges associated with predicting cryptocurrency’s price movements. ...

Analyzing Communicability and Connectivity in the Indian Stock Market During Crises ArXiv ID: 2502.08242 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Understanding how information flows through the financial networks is important, especially during times of market turbulence. Unlike traditional assumptions where information travels along the shortest paths, real-world diffusion processes often follow multiple routes. To capture this complexity, we apply communicability, a network measure that quantifies the ease of information flow between nodes, even beyond the shortest path. In this study, we aim to examine how communicability responds to structural disruptions in financial networks during periods of high volatility. We compute communicability-based metrics on correlation-derived networks constructed from financial market data, and apply statistical testing through permutation methods to identify significant shifts in network structure. Our results show that approximately 70% and 80% of stock pairs exhibit statistically significant changes in communicability during the global financial crisis and the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis, respectively, at a significance level of 0.001. The observed shifts in shortest communicability path lengths offer directional cues about the nature and depth of each crisis. Furthermore, when used as features in machine learning classification models, communicability measures outperform the shortest-path-based measures in distinguishing between market stability and volatility periods. The performance of geometric measures was also comparable to that of topology-based measures. These findings offer valuable insights into the dynamic behavior of financial markets during times of crises and underscore the practical relevance of communicability in modeling systemic risk and information diffusion in complex networks. ...

TLOB: A Novel Transformer Model with Dual Attention for Price Trend Prediction with Limit Order Book Data ArXiv ID: 2502.15757 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Price Trend Prediction (PTP) based on Limit Order Book (LOB) data is a fundamental challenge in financial markets. Despite advances in deep learning, existing models fail to generalize across different market conditions and assets. Surprisingly, by adapting a simple MLP-based architecture to LOB, we show that we surpass SoTA performance; thus, challenging the necessity of complex architectures. Unlike past work that shows robustness issues, we propose TLOB, a transformer-based model that uses a dual attention mechanism to capture spatial and temporal dependencies in LOB data. This allows it to adaptively focus on the market microstructure, making it particularly effective for longer-horizon predictions and volatile market conditions. We also introduce a new labeling method that improves on previous ones, removing the horizon bias. We evaluate TLOB’s effectiveness across four horizons, using the established FI-2010 benchmark, a NASDAQ and a Bitcoin dataset. TLOB outperforms SoTA methods in every dataset and horizon. Additionally, we empirically show how stock price predictability has declined over time, -6.68 in F1-score, highlighting the growing market efficiency. Predictability must be considered in relation to transaction costs, so we experimented with defining trends using an average spread, reflecting the primary transaction cost. The resulting performance deterioration underscores the complexity of translating trend classification into profitable trading strategies. We argue that our work provides new insights into the evolving landscape of stock price trend prediction and sets a strong foundation for future advancements in financial AI. We release the code at https://github.com/LeonardoBerti00/TLOB. ...

Trend-encoded Probabilistic Multi-order Model: A Non-Machine Learning Approach for Enhanced Stock Market Forecasts ArXiv ID: 2502.08144 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract In recent years, the dominance of machine learning in stock market forecasting has been evident. While these models have shown decreasing prediction errors, their robustness across different datasets has been a concern. A successful stock market prediction model minimizes prediction errors and showcases robustness across various data sets, indicating superior forecasting performance. This study introduces a novel multiple lag order probabilistic model based on trend encoding (TeMoP) that enhances stock market predictions through a probabilistic approach. Results across different stock indexes from nine countries demonstrate that the TeMoP outperforms the state-of-the-art machine learning models in predicting accuracy and stabilization. ...

FinRL-DeepSeek: LLM-Infused Risk-Sensitive Reinforcement Learning for Trading Agents ArXiv ID: 2502.07393 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This paper presents a novel risk-sensitive trading agent combining reinforcement learning and large language models (LLMs). We extend the Conditional Value-at-Risk Proximal Policy Optimization (CPPO) algorithm, by adding risk assessment and trading recommendation signals generated by a LLM from financial news. Our approach is backtested on the Nasdaq-100 index benchmark, using financial news data from the FNSPID dataset and the DeepSeek V3, Qwen 2.5 and Llama 3.3 language models. The code, data, and trading agents are available at: https://github.com/benstaf/FinRL_DeepSeek ...

Integrating the implied regularity into implied volatility models: A study on free arbitrage model ArXiv ID: 2502.07518 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Implied volatility IV is a key metric in financial markets, reflecting market expectations of future price fluctuations. Research has explored IV’s relationship with moneyness, focusing on its connection to the implied Hurst exponent H. Our study reveals that H approaches 1/2 when moneyness equals 1, marking a critical point in market efficiency expectations. We developed an IV model that integrates H to capture these dynamics more effectively. This model considers the interaction between H and the underlying-to-strike price ratio S/K, crucial for capturing IV variations based on moneyness. Using Optuna optimization across multiple indexes, the model outperformed SABR and fSABR in accuracy. This approach provides a more detailed representation of market expectations and IV-H dynamics, improving options pricing and volatility forecasting while enhancing theoretical and pratcical financial analysis. ...