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ML-QuantIssue No. 138

Quant research, ranked weekly.

Every Friday we screen every new arXiv, SSRN and RePEc paper, rank the best 30 per venue, pull each paper's key figure, and track what happens to it afterwards. Free for people. Open to agents.

Issues
138
Papers featured
6,936
Cited 100+ times
231
Quants on the radar
10.6k

This week's top picks

From issue No. 138. All 90 papers →

  1. LLM Stock-News Signals Under Scrutiny

    A pre-registered blinded test finds that language-model readings of company news lose their predictive power in real time and that commercial models identify masked companies in two-thirds of cases.

    Fanfare 4LLMs & Text
    No pre-registered strategy survives costs: net of 10 basis points every main book loses, and the convergence strategy
  2. The Hidden Sharpe Ratio

    Fanfare 4Portfolio & Allocation

    The study estimates maximum Sharpe ratios in large cross-sections without constructing the efficient portfolio, finding annualized maximal Sharpe of 7.4 in U.S. equities versus benchmark estimates of 1.0 to 4.0.

  3. Monetary policy expansionary and contractionary periods overlaid with interest rate movements over time.
  4. What models know versus what they say
  5. Following AI adoption, financial analysts revise high-ESG forecasts upward and become more bullish, but forecast accuracy deteriorates and errors rise for top-ESG firms.

What's rising

Topics drawing unusually many papers this week.

  1. Yield curve

    2.6×

    2.0% of this week's 441 new papers, 2.6x its share over the previous 6 weeks (0.8%).

  2. Regime switching

    1.8×

    2.0% of this week's 441 new papers, 1.8x its share over the previous 6 weeks (1.1%).

  3. Earnings and analysts

    1.4×

    4.8% of this week's 441 new papers, 1.4x its share over the previous 6 weeks (3.3%).

GitHub radar

What the quant community starred on GitHub this week, from a panel of 10,589 developers who follow financial machine learning (290 of the 858 we checked starred something). Counts only: we never publish who starred what.

Quant repos rising

  1. Claude skills for day trading with backtesting and timing.

    ★ 5,704+2,004 this weekPythonNew repo

  2. Real-time event intelligence and fraud detection for finance.

    ★ 231+233 this weekTypeScriptNew repo

  3. QuantJourney backtester for testing trading strategies.

    ★ 597+426 this weekPython

  4. QuantLib models with hidden Markov regime switching.

    ★ 11+3 this weekPythonNew repo

  5. Local-first investment research system with 18 investor personas.

    ★ 681+32 this weekPython

  6. Finance terminal for Bloomberg-style market data tracking.

    ★ 2,654+70 this weekTypeScript

  7. Foundation model for the language of financial markets.

    ★ 47.0k+2,827 this weekPython

  8. Multi-agent LLM framework for financial trading.

    ★ 121k+2,276 this weekPython

What quants are playing with

  1. Framework for building semantic graph-based reasoning layers over data.

    ★ 8,496+7,839 this weekPython

  2. CLI for AI agents to use computers.

    ★ 17.8k+15.2k this weekRust

  3. Towards a more autonomous agent system.

    ★ 20.1k+20.1k this weekTypeScriptNew repo

  4. Understand how any software works and craft your own.

    ★ 17.0k+17.0k this weekRustNew repo

  5. Open-source bot with virtual machine for agent use.

    ★ 14.6k+5,650 this weekTypeScriptNew repo

  6. AWS local emulator alternative.

    ★ 30.7k+3,363 this weekJava

We called it

Every featured paper is tracked on Semantic Scholar. Of the finance papers we featured when new, 26% are now in journals.

  1. 531

    FinGPT: Open-Source Financial Large Language Models

    Featured 14 Jun 2023, 5 days after release

  2. 280

    FinMem: A Performance-Enhanced LLM Trading Agent With Layered Memory and Character Design

    Featured 29 Nov 2023, 6 days after release · IEEE Transactions on Big Data

  3. 254

    HybridRAG: Integrating Knowledge Graphs and Vector Retrieval Augmented Generation for Efficient Information Extraction

    Featured 15 Aug 2024, 6 days after release · Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on AI in Finance

  4. 247

    TradingAgents: Multi-Agents LLM Financial Trading Framework

    Featured 1 Jan 2025, 4 days after release

  5. 195

    TKAN: Temporal Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

    Featured 15 May 2024, 3 days after release

  6. 148

    Instruct-FinGPT: Financial Sentiment Analysis by Instruction Tuning of General-Purpose Large Language Models

    Featured 28 Jun 2023, 6 days after release

Browse by topic

Papers featured per quarter since May 2023.

  1. Crypto & DeFi

    Crypto & DeFi: papers featured per quarter

    Crypto assets, DeFi, stablecoins and blockchain markets.

    • Factors Influencing Cryptocurrency Prices: Evidence from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, Litcoin, and Monero
    • Decentralised Finance and Automated Market Making: Execution and Speculation

    322 papers

  2. LLMs & Text

    LLMs & Text: papers featured per quarter

    Large language models, agents, sentiment and text as data in finance.

    • DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models
    • Mistral 7B

    600 papers

  3. Derivatives & Volatility

    Derivatives & Volatility: papers featured per quarter

    Option pricing, volatility models and forecasting, hedging and implied surfaces.

    • Risk Revisited
    • Rough Volatility: Fact or Artefact?

    917 papers

  4. Trading, Microstructure & Execution

    Trading, Microstructure & Execution: papers featured per quarter

    Order books, market making, execution, high-frequency data and trading signals.

    • FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models
    • Deep Reinforcement Learning for Active High Frequency Trading

    616 papers

  5. Portfolio & Allocation

    Portfolio & Allocation: papers featured per quarter

    Portfolio construction, allocation, rebalancing and risk budgeting, from Markowitz to deep RL.

    • Missing values handling for machine learning portfolios
    • Technical Note - An Unexpected Stochastic Dominance: Pareto Distributions, Dependence, and Diversification

    659 papers

  6. Risk, Credit & Banking

    Risk, Credit & Banking: papers featured per quarter

    Credit risk, default prediction, banking, systemic risk and risk measures.

    • Attention-based Dynamic Multilayer Graph Neural Networks for Loan Default Prediction
    • Moderating effects of gender and family responsibilities on the relations between work–family policies and job performance

    422 papers

  7. Asset Pricing & Factors

    Asset Pricing & Factors: papers featured per quarter

    Factor models, anomalies, the cross-section of returns and what survives publication.

    • Bubble economics
    • NUMOSIM: A Synthetic Mobility Dataset with Anomaly Detection Benchmarks

    312 papers

  8. Macro-Finance & Rates

    Macro-Finance & Rates: papers featured per quarter

    Rates, the yield curve, monetary policy, inflation and macro-finance.

    • The disruption index is biased by citation inflation
    • Inflation—Who Cares? Monetary Policy in Times of Low Attention

    317 papers

  9. Econometrics & Forecasting

    Econometrics & Forecasting: papers featured per quarter

    Forecasting, time series, econometrics and nowcasting.

    • TKAN: Temporal Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks
    • Deep learning models for price forecasting of financial time series: A review of recent advancements: 2020–2022

    354 papers

  10. ML & AI Methods

    ML & AI Methods: papers featured per quarter

    Machine-learning methods applied to finance: deep learning, boosting, RL and new architectures.

    • Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces
    • Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy

    1,181 papers

  11. Corporate Finance

    Corporate Finance: papers featured per quarter

    Firms, governance, IPOs, M&A and corporate decisions.

    • ESG Reputation Risk Matters: An Event Study Based on Social Media Data
    • Articulate AnyMesh: Open-Vocabulary 3D Articulated Objects Modeling

    170 papers

Recent issues

138 issues since May 2023.

Week 1

No. 138 · November 2026, Week 1

This week spotlights credibility gaps in quantitative finance: LLMs lose predictive power in live trading despite strong backtests, knowledge cutoffs and future-look bias inflate strategy alphas, and reproducibility remains fragile. Standouts: LLM Stock-News Signals Under Scrutiny, LLM Knowledge Cutoffs and Backtests,…

  1. LLM Stock-News Signals Under Scrutiny
  2. The Hidden Sharpe Ratio
  3. Newspaper Reasons Explain Returns

90 papers · arXiv 30 · SSRN 30 · RePEc 30

Week 5

No. 137 · October 2026, Week 5

This week centers on AI agent fragility in financial markets, real-time benchmark design preventing memorization, and cryptographic signals predicting equities. AI Equity Research Without Future Data reveals forecast accuracy well below overall performance; Fragility Of Synchronized Agentic Wealth Management quantifie…

  1. AI Equity Research Without Future Data
  2. AI Monoculture Paradox in Markets
  3. 150 Years of US Inflation Expectations

90 papers · arXiv 30 · SSRN 30 · RePEc 30

Week 4

No. 136 · October 2026, Week 4

This week spans AI risk in trading, neural microstructure learning, and the frontier's limits. Key tensions emerge: LLM traders fall to information attacks while benchmarks show no leading model beats equal-weight; neural filters cut arbitrage uncertainty eightfold yet ML VaR models hide regime-shift failures. Mean-fi…

  1. Information Injection Attacks on LLM Traders
  2. ML Value-at-Risk Validation Under Regime Shifts
  3. AI Productivity Gains Boost GDP Growth

90 papers · arXiv 30 · SSRN 30 · RePEc 30

Week 3

No. 135 · October 2026, Week 3

This week pivots toward machine learning in discovery and execution. Foundation models learn market regimes from order flow; genetic programming and RL agents discover alpha factors across assets and frequencies. But a survey of 47 LLM trading systems finds reported margins vanish on retest, and a massive pre-register…

  1. Foundation Models Learn Market Regimes
  2. LLM-Based Trading Systems Survey
  3. Large Language Models in Economics Research

90 papers · arXiv 30 · SSRN 30 · RePEc 30

Week 2

No. 134 · October 2026, Week 2

This week centers on AI systemic risk, factor discovery limits, and monetary transmission channels. Agentic AI systems create non-diversifiable contagion floors despite fleet size; automated factor mining shows no paradigm dominates; and Fed policy transmits primarily through risk appetite shifts rather than rates. Se…

  1. Agentic AI and Systemic Financial Risk
  2. Quantitative Equity Evolution: Constraints and Alpha Decay
  3. Risk Appetite and Monetary Transmission

90 papers · arXiv 30 · SSRN 30 · RePEc 30

Week 1

No. 133 · October 2026, Week 1

This week centers on AI's expanding role in trading and markets, alongside persistent microstructure patterns and monetary policy transmission. Key papers: "AI Trading Methods: Backtests Versus Real Markets" measures the live-market gap for machine learning and LLM strategies; "Certified Alpha Capacity and Decay" deri…

  1. Certified Alpha Capacity and Decay
  2. Bond Signals Predict Next-Month Equity Returns
  3. AI and Corporate Bond Pricing

90 papers · arXiv 30 · SSRN 30 · RePEc 30

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The week's best arXiv, SSRN and RePEc papers, each in one sentence, with its key figure. Plus what quant developers are starring on GitHub and which of our past picks just got published.

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