titleInvestor's Last Exam: Can AI Agents Do Equity Investment Without Seeing the Future?
authorsHuangfei Jiang, Anning Hu, Kai Sheng, Yuchen Cai, Rui Ge, Xiangyu Kong, Jianghao Lin, Shuzi Chen, Jiyi Weng, Junchi Yan
date2026-10-28
venuearXiv (preprint, not peer reviewed)
idarXiv:2610.38342
upvotes11 (Hugging Face Daily Papers, 2026-11-01)
linksabs pdf hf code
abstractFinancial agents must form forecasts and investment judgments from decision-time evidence, with predictions evaluated against subsequent outcomes. Existing benchmarks assess financial knowledge, research workflows, or forecasting, but evaluating the full research process requires a strictly frozen information set and professional evaluation criteria. We introduce Investor's Last Exam (ILE), an equity-research benchmark led by experienced buy-side investors and fund managers. Its three components are a versioned financial database spanning 3.43 million document versions and nine source categories, supplemented by structured market data, with validated timestamps governing retrieval and computation; a task taxonomy organized around professional analyst deliverables; and an expert-led framework linking scoring criteria to sources, calculations, and assumptions through financial dependency graphs. Evaluation spans 86 assignments and jointly assesses research quality, forecast accuracy, and simulated investment performance. GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 lead overall at 68.1 and 66.9 out of 100, yet even Astra scores only 52.5 on Forecast & Model. Our results show that even state-of-the-art models fail to translate overall research capability into predictive performance. ILE shifts the evaluation unit from isolated capabilities to the evidence--assumption--judgment chain, allowing researchers to locate where analytical advantages fail to translate into forecasts and investment judgments, and providing a traceable, diagnostic foundation for training and evaluating financial agents.

cite

@misc{jiang2026investor,
  title={Investor's Last Exam: Can AI Agents Do Equity Investment Without Seeing the Future?},
  author={Huangfei Jiang and Anning Hu and Kai Sheng and Yuchen Cai and Rui Ge and Xiangyu Kong and Jianghao Lin and Shuzi Chen and Jiyi Weng and Junchi Yan},
  year={2026},
  eprint={2610.38342},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38342}
}