arXiv · arXiv q-fin · 2026
Timing-based tilts across asset classes can drive much of the risk and return of a diversified cross-asset portfolio. The standard approach forecasts returns and then optimizes weights. We instead study an end-to-end AI-based policy that maps market states directly to portfolio weights, and we then ask when this one-step modeling approach outperforms simple rules-based strategies. We train these policies on the sixte…
Austin Pollok, Kevin Robik
arXiv · arXiv q-fin · 2026
Managing drawdown, the peak-to-trough decline in an investment portfolio's value, is a precondition for long-term survival in practical investment management. However, mainstream stock forecasting methods predominantly optimize returns or Sharpe ratios under the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) assumption. Real markets do not follow this assumption, triggering catastrophic drawdowns. We propose a cros…
Yu Peng, Matloob Khushi, Josiah Poon
arXiv · arXiv q-fin · 2026
Portfolio risk assessment ordinarily relies on reliable estimates of cross-asset return covariances, which are difficult to obtain in short, high-dimensional panels. We show that firm-level distribution-valued characteristics can instead provide one-sided certificates of portfolio risk. Under maintained links from characteristics to systematic exposures and from exposures to returns, multi-firm Wasserstein-2 dispersi…
Marcus Gawronsky, Chun-Sung Huang
arXiv · arXiv q-fin · 2026
Cryptocurrencies are increasingly adopted as investment assets, making their interactions with traditional financial markets central to cross-asset diversification and systemic risk. This paper studies the integration of cryptocurrencies, fiat currencies, and S&P500 equities using a balanced panel of 381 assets from October 2017 to February 2024. We combine rolling correlation networks, community structure, market-sp…
Ruixue Jing, Luis Enrique Correa Rocha
arXiv · arXiv · 2026
This paper develops a unified framework that links firm-level predictive signals, cross-asset spillovers, and the stochastic discount factor (SDF). Signals and spillovers are jointly estimated by maximizing the Sharpe ratio, yielding an interpretable SDF that both ranks characteristic relevance and uncovers the direction of predictive influence across assets. Out-of-sample, the SDF consistently outperforms self-predi…
Doron Avramov, Xin He
arXiv · arXiv q-fin · 2026
Foundation models have transformed domains from language to genomics by learning general-purpose representations from large-scale, heterogeneous data. We introduce TradeFM, a 524M-parameter generative Transformer that brings this paradigm to market microstructure, learning directly from billions of trade events across >9K equities. To enable cross-asset generalization, we develop scale-invariant features and a univer…
Maxime Kawawa-Beaudan, Srijan Sood, Kassiani Papasotiriou, Daniel Borrajo, Manuela Veloso
arXiv · arXiv q-fin · 2018
The composition of natural liquidity has been changing over time. An analysis of intraday volumes for the S&P500 constituent stocks illustrates that (i) volume surprises, i.e., deviations from their respective forecasts, are correlated across stocks, and (ii) this correlation increases during the last few hours of the trading session. These observations could be attributed, in part, to the prevalence of portfolio tra…
Seungki Min, Costis Maglaras, Ciamac C. Moallemi
arXiv · arXiv q-fin · 2026
Conditional portfolio models estimate risk relative to a chosen information set, yet rarely test whether that information removes common cross-asset dependence. When it does not, systematic risk may be treated as idiosyncratic, distorting portfolios and attainable efficient frontiers. We formulate this prior problem as screening-off for portfolio choice. A hierarchy separates causal, distributional and second-moment …
Alejandro Rodriguez Dominguez
arXiv · arXiv q-fin · 2022
This paper derives an optimal portfolio that is based on trend-following signal. Building on an earlier related article, it provides a unifying theoretical setting to introduce an autocorrelation model with the covariance matrix of trends and risk premia. We specify practically relevant models for the covariance matrix of trends. The optimal portfolio is decomposed into four basic components that yield four basic por…
Sebastien Valeyre
arXiv · arXiv · 2026
Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance across diverse financial tasks, yet portfolio management (PM) remains poorly benchmarked. Existing benchmarks exhibit two gaps: they are often equity-only and ignore cross-asset correlations; they fail to evaluate the complete PM decision pipeline. We introduce PortBench, a benchmark spanning six heterogeneous asset classes from 2015 to 2025. PortBench compri…
Yuxuan Zhao, Sijia Chen, Ningxin Su
arXiv · arXiv · 2021
The problem of portfolio management represents an important and challenging class of dynamic decision making problems, where rebalancing decisions need to be made over time with the consideration of many factors such as investors preferences, trading environments, and market conditions. In this paper, we present a new portfolio policy network architecture for deep reinforcement learning (DRL)that can exploit more eff…
Saeed Marzban, Erick Delage, Jonathan Yumeng Li, Jeremie Desgagne-Bouchard, Carl Dussault
arXiv · arXiv · 2026
We propose DeePM (Deep Portfolio Manager), a structured deep-learning macro portfolio manager trained end-to-end to maximize a robust, risk-adjusted utility. DeePM addresses three fundamental challenges in financial learning: (1) it resolves the asynchronous "ragged filtration" problem via a Directed Delay (Causal Sieve) mechanism that prioritizes causal impulse-response learning over information freshness; (2) it co…
Kieran Wood, Stephen J. Roberts, Stefan Zohren
arXiv · arXiv · 2026
The stability of markets hosting leveraged exchange-traded products is governed not by any single product's loop gain but by the spectral radius of a loop-gain matrix, and scalar per-product monitoring underestimates system feedback by construction. Recent work measures the self-reinforcement of a leveraged fund's daily close rebalancing through a scalar loop gain and treats cross-asset spillovers as bias. We model c…
Jihwan Woo
arXiv · arXiv · 2026
Generating realistic synthetic option prices requires implied volatility as an input, yet implied volatility is itself derived from observed option prices, creating a circular dependency that limits synthetic data for machine-learning and risk-analysis applications. We break this circularity with a pipeline in which implied volatility emerges as an output of a structural model of equity returns. A Jump Hidden Markov …
Julia Sun, Zheyu Jin, Jiawei Zhang, Jeffrey D. Varner
arXiv · arXiv · 2025
Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across benchmarks--from knowledge quizzes and math reasoning to web-agent tasks--but these tests occur in static settings, lacking real dynamics and uncertainty. Consequently, they evaluate isolated reasoning or problem-solving rather than decision-making under uncertainty. To address this, we introduce LiveTradeBench, a live trading environment for evaluating L…
Haofei Yu, Fenghai Li, Jiaxuan You
arXiv · arXiv · 2021
Flash crashes in financial markets have become increasingly important attracting attention from financial regulators, market makers as well as from the media and the broader audience. Systemic risk and propagation of shocks in financial markets is also a topic of great relevance that attracted increasing attention in recent years. In the present work we bridge the gap between these two topics with an in-depth investi…
Jeremy Turiel, Tomaso Aste
arXiv · arXiv · 2026
We study strategic trading around index reconstitution in a continuous-time, multiasset game with transient cross-asset price impact and heterogeneous beliefs about future index membership. Opportunistic traders position before a public announcement, adjust to the revealed composition, and trade around an indexer following a prescribed execution schedule. Under a no-price-manipulation condition, we construct a subgam…
Lukas-Benedikt Fiechtner, Jose Blanchet