The Price of Thought: Does Test-Time Reasoning Pay in LLM Trading?

arXiv:2609.30705 · cs.AI · Submitted 2026-09-25 · Read on arXiv

cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-09-25

Updated: 2026-09-25

Terminology

• Benchmark — 10× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Robustness — 4× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Trace — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Calibration — 2× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Chain-of-Thought Prompting — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Consistency — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Data Provenance — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Provenance — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Self-consistency — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verification — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verifier — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Abstention — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adaptive Reasoning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Aggregation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Commentary — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Embeddings — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fidelity — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generative Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generative Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Information Gain — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Information Leakage — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Instruction Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Large Language Model (LLM) — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Multi-Agent System — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Multimodal Inputs — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Selection Bias — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Test-time Scaling — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• FinTradeBench: A Financial Reasoning Benchmark for LLMs
• Reasoning on a Budget: A Survey of Adaptive and Controllable Test-Time Compute in LLMs
• FinBERT: Financial Sentiment Analysis with Pre-trained Language Models
• StockBench: Can LLM Agents Trade Stocks Profitably In Real-world Markets?
• FinQA: A Dataset of Numerical Reasoning over Financial Data
• DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
• INVESTORBENCH: A Benchmark for Financial Decision-Making Tasks with LLM-based Agent
• Profit Mirage: Revisiting Information Leakage in LLM-based Financial Agents
• Let's Verify Step by Step
• Can ChatGPT Forecast Stock Price Movements? Return Predictability and Large Language Models
• s1: Simple test-time scaling
• Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters
• When Reasoning Fails: Evaluating 'Thinking' LLMs for Stock Prediction
• Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models
• Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
• BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance
• Agentic Trading: When LLM Agents Meet Financial Markets
• TradingAgents: Multi-Agents LLM Financial Trading Framework
• FinBen: A Holistic Financial Benchmark for Large Language Models
• PIXIU: A Large Language Model, Instruction Data and Evaluation Benchmark for Finance

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