Generative AI

Generative AI for Analysts ArXiv ID: 2512.19705 “View on arXiv” Authors: Jian Xue, Qian Zhang, Wu Zhu Abstract We study how generative artificial intelligence (AI) transforms the work of financial analysts. Using the 2023 launch of FactSet’s AI platform as a natural experiment, we find that adoption produces markedly richer and more comprehensive reports – featuring 40% more distinct information sources, 34% broader topical coverage, and 25% greater use of advanced analytical methods – while also improving timeliness. However, forecast errors rise by 59% as AI-assisted reports convey a more balanced mix of positive and negative information that is harder to synthesize, particularly for analysts facing heavier cognitive demands. Placebo tests using other data vendors confirm that these effects are unique to FactSet’s AI integration. Overall, our findings reveal both the productivity gains and cognitive limits of generative AI in financial information production. ...

Benchmarking Pre-Trained Time Series Models for Electricity Price Forecasting ArXiv ID: 2506.08113 “View on arXiv” Authors: Timothée Hornek Amir Sartipi, Igor Tchappi, Gilbert Fridgen Abstract Accurate electricity price forecasting (EPF) is crucial for effective decision-making in power trading on the spot market. While recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have inspired the development of numerous time series foundation models (TSFMs) for time series forecasting, their effectiveness in EPF remains uncertain. To address this gap, we benchmark several state-of-the-art pretrained models–Chronos-Bolt, Chronos-T5, TimesFM, Moirai, Time-MoE, and TimeGPT–against established statistical and machine learning (ML) methods for EPF. Using 2024 day-ahead auction (DAA) electricity prices from Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, and Belgium, we generate daily forecasts with a one-day horizon. Chronos-Bolt and Time-MoE emerge as the strongest among the TSFMs, performing on par with traditional models. However, the biseasonal MSTL model, which captures daily and weekly seasonality, stands out for its consistent performance across countries and evaluation metrics, with no TSFM statistically outperforming it. ...

Diffusion Factor Models: Generating High-Dimensional Returns with Factor Structure ArXiv ID: 2504.06566 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Financial scenario simulation is essential for risk management and portfolio optimization, yet it remains challenging especially in high-dimensional and small data settings common in finance. We propose a diffusion factor model that integrates latent factor structure into generative diffusion processes, bridging econometrics with modern generative AI to address the challenges of the curse of dimensionality and data scarcity in financial simulation. By exploiting the low-dimensional factor structure inherent in asset returns, we decompose the score function–a key component in diffusion models–using time-varying orthogonal projections, and this decomposition is incorporated into the design of neural network architectures. We derive rigorous statistical guarantees, establishing nonasymptotic error bounds for both score estimation at O(d^{“5/2”} n^{"-2/(k+5)"}) and generated distribution at O(d^{“5/4”} n^{"-1/2(k+5)"}), primarily driven by the intrinsic factor dimension k rather than the number of assets d, surpassing the dimension-dependent limits in the classical nonparametric statistics literature and making the framework viable for markets with thousands of assets. Numerical studies confirm superior performance in latent subspace recovery under small data regimes. Empirical analysis demonstrates the economic significance of our framework in constructing mean-variance optimal portfolios and factor portfolios. This work presents the first theoretical integration of factor structure with diffusion models, offering a principled approach for high-dimensional financial simulation with limited data. Our code is available at https://github.com/xymmmm00/diffusion_factor_model. ...

AI-Powered (Finance) Scholarship ArXiv ID: ssrn-5103553 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This paper describes a process for automatically generating academic finance papers using large language models (LLMs). It demonstrates the process’ efficacy by Keywords: Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), Automated Research, Financial Modeling, NLP, Technology Complexity vs Empirical Score Math Complexity: 1.0/10 Empirical Rigor: 0.5/10 Quadrant: Philosophers Why: The paper focuses on the process of using LLMs to generate academic content, lacking advanced mathematical derivations, while showing minimal evidence of backtesting or implementation-heavy data analysis. flowchart TD A["Research Goal<br>Automate Finance Paper Generation"] --> B["Inputs<br>Financial Data + LLM Prompts"] B --> C{"Methodology<br>Multi-Step Chain-of-Thought"} C --> D["Computational Process<br>LLM Synthesis & Modeling"] D --> E{"Evaluation<br>Human Expert Review"} E --> F["Outcomes<br>High-Quality Finance Papers"] E --> G["Outcomes<br>Validation of LLM Efficacy"] F --> H["Final Result<br>AI-Powered Scholarship Pipeline"] G --> H

AI-Powered (Finance) Scholarship ArXiv ID: ssrn-5060022 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Keywords: Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), Academic Research, Natural Language Processing, Automation, Technology Complexity vs Empirical Score Math Complexity: 1.0/10 Empirical Rigor: 2.0/10 Quadrant: Philosophers Why: The paper focuses on the conceptual process of using LLMs to generate academic papers, rather than presenting complex mathematical models or empirical backtesting results. flowchart TD A["Research Goal<br>Automate Academic Paper Generation"] --> B{"Methodology"} B --> C["Data/Input<br>LLM & Financial Datasets"] B --> D["Data/Input<br>Research Questions"] C --> E["Computational Process<br>LLM Content Generation"] D --> E E --> F["Key Findings<br>Successful Paper Automation"] E --> G["Key Findings<br>Validated Methodology"]

Generative AI, Managerial Expectations, and Economic Activity ArXiv ID: 2410.03897 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract We use generative AI to extract managerial expectations about their economic outlook from 120,000+ corporate conference call transcripts. The resulting AI Economy Score predicts GDP growth, production, and employment up to 10 quarters ahead, beyond existing measures like survey forecasts. Moreover, industry and firm-level measures provide valuable information about sector-specific and individual firm activities. A composite measure that integrates managerial expectations about firm, industry, and macroeconomic conditions further significantly improves the forecasting power and predictive horizon of national and sectoral growth. Our findings show managerial expectations offer unique insights into economic activity, with implications for both macroeconomic and microeconomic decision-making. ...

SARF: Enhancing Stock Market Prediction with Sentiment-Augmented Random Forest ArXiv ID: 2410.07143 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Stock trend forecasting, a challenging problem in the financial domain, involves ex-tensive data and related indicators. Relying solely on empirical analysis often yields unsustainable and ineffective results. Machine learning researchers have demonstrated that the application of random forest algorithm can enhance predictions in this context, playing a crucial auxiliary role in forecasting stock trends. This study introduces a new approach to stock market prediction by integrating sentiment analysis using FinGPT generative AI model with the traditional Random Forest model. The proposed technique aims to optimize the accuracy of stock price forecasts by leveraging the nuanced understanding of financial sentiments provided by FinGPT. We present a new methodology called “Sentiment-Augmented Random Forest” (SARF), which in-corporates sentiment features into the Random Forest framework. Our experiments demonstrate that SARF outperforms conventional Random Forest and LSTM models with an average accuracy improvement of 9.23% and lower prediction errors in pre-dicting stock market movements. ...

A First Look at Financial Data Analysis Using ChatGPT-4o ArXiv ID: ssrn-4849578 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract OpenAI’s new flagship model, ChatGPT-4o, released on May 13, 2024, offers enhanced natural language understanding and more coherent responses. In this paper, we Keywords: Large Language Models (LLMs), Natural Language Processing, Generative AI, AI Evaluation, Model Performance, Technology/AI Complexity vs Empirical Score Math Complexity: 4.0/10 Empirical Rigor: 6.5/10 Quadrant: Street Traders Why: The paper involves implementing and comparing specific financial models like ARMA-GARCH, indicating moderate-to-high implementation complexity, but the core mathematics is largely descriptive and comparative rather than novel. Empirical rigor is high due to the use of real datasets (CRSP, Fama-French) and direct backtesting comparisons against Stata. flowchart TD A["Research Goal: Evaluate ChatGPT-4o for Financial Data Analysis"] --> B["Methodology: Zero-shot vs. Chain-of-Thought"] B --> C["Input: Financial Statements & Market Data"] C --> D["Process: Text Generation & Sentiment Analysis"] D --> E["Output: Financial Predictions & Explanations"] E --> F["Key Findings: High Accuracy in NLP Tasks"] F --> G["Outcome: Strong Potential but Limited Numerical Reasoning"]

StockGPT: A GenAI Model for Stock Prediction and Trading ArXiv ID: 2404.05101 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This paper introduces StockGPT, an autoregressive ``number’’ model trained and tested on 70 million daily U.S.\ stock returns over nearly 100 years. Treating each return series as a sequence of tokens, StockGPT automatically learns the hidden patterns predictive of future returns via its attention mechanism. On a held-out test sample from 2001 to 2023, daily and monthly rebalanced long-short portfolios formed from StockGPT predictions yield strong performance. The StockGPT-based portfolios span momentum and long-/short-term reversals, eliminating the need for manually crafted price-based strategies, and yield highly significant alphas against leading stock market factors, suggesting a novel AI pricing effect. This highlights the immense promise of generative AI in surpassing human in making complex financial investment decisions. ...

Deep Generative Modeling for Financial Time Series with Application in VaR: A Comparative Review ArXiv ID: 2401.10370 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract In the financial services industry, forecasting the risk factor distribution conditional on the history and the current market environment is the key to market risk modeling in general and value at risk (VaR) model in particular. As one of the most widely adopted VaR models in commercial banks, Historical simulation (HS) uses the empirical distribution of daily returns in a historical window as the forecast distribution of risk factor returns in the next day. The objectives for financial time series generation are to generate synthetic data paths with good variety, and similar distribution and dynamics to the original historical data. In this paper, we apply multiple existing deep generative methods (e.g., CGAN, CWGAN, Diffusion, and Signature WGAN) for conditional time series generation, and propose and test two new methods for conditional multi-step time series generation, namely Encoder-Decoder CGAN and Conditional TimeVAE. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive framework with a set of KPIs to measure the quality of the generated time series for financial modeling. The KPIs cover distribution distance, autocorrelation and backtesting. All models (HS, parametric and neural networks) are tested on both historical USD yield curve data and additional data simulated from GARCH and CIR processes. The study shows that top performing models are HS, GARCH and CWGAN models. Future research directions in this area are also discussed. ...