Saad Naja, Nasser Odtallah, Jake Van-Praag, Sarah May
Trading discipline often fails people. Our study tested whether four AI trading agents followed their strategies and risk rules. Offering traders the evidence and an agent evaluation toolkit to separate luck from following the rules, before giving agents meaningful autonomy or capital. Our study analysed 2,627 closed positions from 12 February to 27 August 2026 across the same asset universe and execution conditions. Most positions were simulated against live prices with a 0.09% round-trip fee; 18% involved real Hyperliquid orders. Each position declared a strategy, stop and target, with a limit of five open positions per agent. The fleet finished net positive after fees. Rule adherence was high across all four agents, including the unprofitable one. Profitability tracked how often agents won relative to their break-even win rates. Institutional-style controls ran by default and contained losses through a 29% market drawdown and recovery, with documented exceptions. The discipline held for all four agents. Agents kept 97.5% of gross loss within declared stops, and typical losses closed at declared levels. Declared risk remained stable after losses and broadly stable across calm and volatile months. Twenty-three of 24 runs respected the position limit; logs identify the exception's size and duration. The same live data produced different results across assigned strategies. The trade-log tests can be rerun from the published trade snapshot; regime tests also require the published Bitcoin prices and regime labels. Section 3.5 specifies the stop-breach tolerance. These trade-level results are not account-level returns or proof of a lasting edge. Our study provides an evaluation toolkit to help traders distinguish rule-following from luck before committing capital. For anyone considering allocating capital to agents to trade, discipline should be the entry test, not the only test.
Recurring cash flows are the backbone of cash-flow underwriting: they separate durable revenue from one-off deposits, expose standing obligations, and ultimately determine ability to pay. For small businesses, recurrence is both indispensable and hard to estimate, because much of their income arrives as ambiguous transfers, most payment streams are short, and schedules follow calendar conventions that frequency-domain methods treat as noise. We present CADENCE, Calendar-Aware Distributional Event Network for Cash-Flow Estimation, a compact causal Transformer that treats each transaction as a token and predicts the amount and a full, nonparametric timing distribution of every cash flow's next payment. Inheriting transaction semantics from an external labeler and a frozen text encoder keeps CADENCE compact yet general across the long tail of small-business counterparties, while predicting a calibrated distribution rather than an opaque embedding makes its outputs interpretable enough to feed existing underwriting models and power credit decisions. Ablations confirm the role of each design choice, with counterparty semantics driving recall on short histories, calendar inputs driving timing accuracy, and no-event supervision driving precision. Against the production FFT baseline, CADENCE improves one-day timing accuracy by 93.3% and next-event F1 by 6.7%, while producing calibrated distributions that serve directly as a confidence gate for downstream decisions. In an end-to-end credit evaluation on production applications, replacing FFT recurrence features with CADENCE features raises KS by 4.8%, raises the approval rate at a fixed loss rate by 18.2%, and lowers the loss rate at a fixed approval rate by 13.1%.
We develop a transparent, auditable large language model (LLM) pipeline for macro-financial stress testing. Structured prompting, with optional retrieval of country fundamentals and news, emits G7 macroeconomic scenarios (GDP growth, inflation, policy rate), which are converted into deviations from an IMF World Economic Outlook baseline and translated into portfolio losses through a three-channel PCA factor model. The macro-to-factor mapping is stipulated rather than estimated, so every tail-risk multiple is conditional on stated assumptions. Across 2,420 accepted scenarios from two model families and three runs, plus an unanchored-severity run and eight risk-layer ablations, we find three things. First, severity is inherited from scenario design, not generated by the model: prompt variant dominates every variance decomposition, removing the prompted severity bands makes GPT-5.6-luna's recession 1.6 pp milder, apparent country heterogeneity largely reflects the institutional baseline, and retrieval and news matter only where the prompt leaves magnitude free. Second, numerical severity and narrative severity are only weakly coupled. Third, GPT-5.6-luna follows its own arithmetic but anchors on prompted bands, whereas Llama-3.1-8B is four to seven times more dispersed and contradicts its own stated changes in 90% of cases. A repeat run differs at the scenario level yet agrees on aggregate multiples to within 0.007 times. LLM scenario generators are best used for narrative and sector elicitation around a prescribed severity path, not as autonomous calibrators of stress magnitude.