The frontier of quantitative finance, in one feed. The newest peer-review-bound research from arXiv’s q-fin archive — trading and market microstructure, portfolio management, risk, pricing, and machine learning in markets — with titles, authors, and abstracts, linked straight to source. Updated continuously.
Allocation, factor investing, and portfolio construction.
Ignas Gasparavičius, Andrius Grigutis
We show that the key optimization results of the classical Markowitz portfolio selection theory, originally formulated for variance as the risk measure, remain available in explicit closed form under a broader class of strictly convex quadratic risk measures. The proposed framework replaces the covariance matrix with an arbitrary symmetri…
Jiayu Li
Systematic trading rests on one article of faith: that regularities found in the past persist. We state it as a time-invariant mechanism driven by an unobserved latent state, and show that it leaves a researcher five constants to declare --- the recurrence bound $Lambda$ at a block length $b$, the invariance defect $epsilon_0$ of the repr…
Jiayu Li
KellyBoost is a single multi-output XGBoost model whose softmax output is the portfolio: with y the vector of per-asset holding-period returns, the training loss is - log(1 + w y), the negative log growth rate, so the fitted model is the growth-optimal (Kelly) allocation conditioned on the features. The objective is exact rather than a su…
Anran Hu, Silvana M. Pesenti, Xiaofei Shi
We study continuous-time dynamic portfolio optimization under a Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) constraint on the investor's terminal loss. For a general class of convex trading objectives, we exploit the auxiliary-threshold representation of CVaR to establish the existence of an optimal strategy and strong duality without requiring mark…
Alejandro Rodriguez Dominguez
Asset-pricing models typically condition on a fixed information set. This paper endogenises the market's conditioning architecture by allowing portfolios to choose representations whose induced exposures affect prices. Capital allocated across representations determines aggregate positions and the clearing premium, while price feedback ch…
Jaehyung Choi
We develop parametric Entropic Value-at-Risk (EVaR) portfolio optimization for tempered stable Lévy returns. We derive portfolio cumulant-generating functions and weight-dependent admissible moment-generating-function domains under two multivariate constructions: a multivariate normal tempered stable approach and an independent component …
Jeonggyu Huh, Yeoneung Kim, Seungwon Jeong
We develop simulation-based policy iteration for continuous-time portfolio choice with predictable returns and convex constraints. Each outer step re-evaluates a fixed-latent OL-BPTT adjoint after deployment and solves the constrained update. Shifted-adjoint cancellation controls the adjoint--HJB Hamiltonian-gradient discrepancy by the po…
Jaegi Jeon, Jeonggyu Huh, Hyeng Keun Koo, Byung Hwa Lim
We develop a scalable adjoint-to-control framework for continuous-time portfolio choice under smooth pointwise constraints. A feasible direct-policy-optimization (DPO) policy supplies rollouts; after training, fixed-latent open-loop BPTT (OL-BPTT) yields first- and second-order pathwise sensitivities, whose conditional projections produce…
Nirvik Sahoo, Chyng Wen Tee, Paul Robert Griffin
The authors present a rigorous empirical evaluation of three distinct optimization paradigms for institutional factor portfolio construction: an entropy-based photonic quantum annealer (Dirac-3, Quantum Computing Inc.), a commercial mixed-integer programming solver (Gurobi), and a model-free deep reinforcement learning agent (SAC). Evalua…
Alireza Kargarzadeh, Nariman Khaledian, Navid Parvini, Arman Khaledian
Large language models can extract richer signals from financial news than fixed sentiment lexicons, and recent work has explored feeding such signals into portfolio construction. We study an uncertainty-aware construction that feeds model-predicted risk -- decomposed into aleatoric and epistemic components -- directly into the covariance …
Liangliang Zhang
Automated quantitative research has made striking progress, yet each system answers the same question: which strategy scores highest on a scalar metric? We argue this question is incomplete. Professional investors do not order "the highest return"; they order an identity--pure stock-selection alpha uncontaminated by style exposure, resili…
Yuhan Fang
A new class of software systems is transforming investment analysis. Large language model agents assembled into collaborative team structures including analysts, researchers, and risk managers are increasingly deployed across financial markets. Yet current multi-agent frameworks share a critical limitation: they rely on the foundational a…
Alejandro Rodriguez Dominguez, Miquel Noguer i Alonso
How much capital a trading strategy can absorb before its edge disappears is a causal question about how much is deployed, but it is answered with observational proxies that rest on incompatible assumptions. We ask what experiment would answer it instead, and show that two features of the problem interact to constrain any answer. Deployed…
Chung-Han Hsieh, Rong Gan
We develop a certified, scalable approximation for high-dimensional Wasserstein distributionally robust portfolio optimization. For expected-utility maximization under order-one Wasserstein ambiguity, standard duality yields a semi-infinite convex program. For long-only portfolios with box support under the one-norm ground metric, an exac…
Sara Chehab, Giorgos Iacovides, Parisa Yazdanparast, Danilo Mandic
Current portfolio construction methods are either agnostic to the effects of idiosyncratic shocks (standard factor models) or to the latent data structure driving systematic returns (recent graph-based approaches). This presents an opportunity to combine the complementary market aspects captured by the factor and graph domains, allowing a…
Sidharth Mallik, Waymond Rodgers
The enormous growth in datasets, both in number and size, has prompted investors to adapt to new ways for assimilating information. Normatively, the approach has been to integrate such datasets into pricing formulations and assess the performance of portfolios created thereafter. However, such approaches underestimate their influence in p…
Shinji Kakinaka, Ken Umeno
Cross-correlations between financial signals are neither scale-free nor amplitude-independent: they vary with the time scale over which they are measured and with the magnitude of the fluctuations that dominate the average. We exploit this structure to construct a portfolio allocation model in which the risk functional is the signed fluct…
Yueman Feng, Wenyuan Li, Mengyi Xu, Pengyu Wei
This paper studies the investment and insurance strategies of defined-contribution (DC) pension plans under the mean-variance framework. We consider a stochastic environment with time-varying interest rates, contributions, and mortality risk. The DC plan members are allowed to decide their bond and stock allocations, as well as their life…
Weicheng Ye, Youran Sun, Xingyu Ren, Shunyao Yu +2
Language models can propose many plausible trading factors, but an autonomous research system must also allocate its evaluation budget, verify its own evidence, and preserve how each candidate was produced. We present AgonAlpha, an architecture that searches over frozen research artifacts---hypotheses, executable expressions, platform evi…
Zachary Feinstein, Ionut Florescu, Sean O'Leary
Automated market makers (AMMs) are typically interpreted and evaluated as decentralized exchanges. Herein, we take the perspective envisioned by Balancer that an AMM can also be viewed as a portfolio technology that programmatically enforces an economic mandate. In particular, we follow the geometric mean market maker (G3M) invariant empl…
Miquel Noguer i Alonso
This paper builds Path Portfolio Optimization: portfolio theory on a path-first framework in which the signature is the universal coordinate of the price path, and asks whether it survives estimation. A portfolio is a linear functional of the signature, so the control lives in a truncated tensor algebra, the covariance of signature coordi…
Taha Choukhmane, Tim de Silva, Weidong Lin, Matthew Akuzawa
We ask a representative sample to write prompts seeking spending and investing advice from LLMs, then simulate the lifetime effects of following the advice under realistic asset and labor market conditions. Applying this method to GPT-5.2, we find following the advice would move respondents toward life cycle theory: broader participation …
Robert Jacob Ryan
Conformal prediction has traditionally been used to quantify prediction uncertainty. We put that uncertainty to a second use, combining a 75% conformal interval with fractional Kelly to size portfolio positions: as the range widens we shrink the position, and as it narrows we grow it. On a six-year development window (2016-2021), with tra…
Amin Izadyar
I revisit the exchange rate disconnect puzzle, first documented by Meese and Rogoff (1983), using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to forecast currency returns based on economic fundamentals. Using ChatGPT and DeepSeek, I analyze a comprehensive dataset of economic data releases for major currency pairs and measure the fundamental …
Francesco Landolfi
How deep and how long should the drawdowns of a systematic trading strategy run, given its Sharpe ratio and the statistical structure of its returns? Building on the drawdown framework of Rej, Seager and Bouchaud (2017), we develop the answer in three steps. We first reframe their closed-form results as a transparent Monte-Carlo experimen…
Igor Halperin
We present a simple framework for dynamic portfolio management that uses nothing but daily prices, trading volumes, and market capitalizations. Its state is three fixed-size matrices built from the price history: the distance matrix of the return correlations and the transition matrices of two Markov chains that rank the S\&P 500 names mo…
Bruno Bouchard, Lucas Gnecco Heredia, Ludovic Moreau, Kim-Anh Pham
As in Bouchard et al. (2010) and Bouchard and Nutz (2014), we study a utility maximization problem with expectation constraint. We first consider a uniformly elliptic case in which the endogenous state boundary associated with the constraint in expectation is proved to be smooth. This allows one to derive a proper Dirichlet condition for …
Christian Bongiorno, Efstratios Manolakis, Rosario Nunzio Mantegna
This paper introduces a compact reformulation of a modular end-to-end neural network for global minimum-variance portfolio optimization that decouples model complexity from both look-back window length and universe size. A five-parameter hyperbolic weighted moving average combined with a saturating exponential replaces the original 2,400-…
Divyanee Garg
Understanding similarity among financial assets is essential for effective portfolio diversification. This paper proposes a novel sentiment-adjusted portfolio optimization framework that integrates Topological Data Analysis (TDA) with technical indicators and FinBERT-based sentiment scores extracted from financial news. A TDA-based distan…
Igor Halperin
The Observable Matrix Dynamics (OMD) approach monitors the time development of complex non-linear systems through the trajectory of a fixed-size distance matrix and its spectrum. We apply it to the S\&P 500 cross section over three crisis decades, the 2001 dot-com bust, the 2007--2008 financial crisis, and the 2020 Covid crash, with three…
Nuerxiati Abudurexiti
The distribution of a normal mean-variance mixture depends on the law of its positive mixing variable. We compare six parametric mixing laws with a grid nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator under the same determinant identification constraint. The mixing mean $m=\E(Z)$ is estimated and is not fixed at one. A paired block bootstrap i…
Boris Belyakov
Market-neutral portfolios aim to generate consistent returns while offsetting systematic market risk. Traditional approaches based on factor models or convex optimization often underperform during market regime shifts or when structural assumptions break down. We propose AlphaZeroBeta, a deep reinforcement learning framework designed to d…
Ting-Jung Lee, Abootaleb Shirvani, Farzana Afroz, Svetlozar T. Rachev +1
Taiwan's central role in global semiconductor manufacturing exposes Taiwan-related ETFs to technology concentration, geopolitical uncertainty, and supply-chain disruptions, resulting in return distributions characterized by heavy tails, volatility clustering, and asymmetric responses to negative shocks. This paper analyzes thirty U.S.-lis…
Igor Halperin, Andrey Itkin
This paper introduces a dynamic portfolio optimization framework for large institutional investors using Scientific Physics-Informed Reinforcement Learning (SciPhyRL). Formulated in continuous time over an extended state space that includes explicit cumulative costs, the approach leverages offline historical data to learn optimal, distrib…
Danial Ramezani, Mostafa Abouei Ardakan
Decision-making is posing an increasingly formidable challenge to investors because of the growing number of alternatives available in financial markets. A hot area of research over the past few decades has been portfolio optimization that seeks to determine how much an investor should invest in which asset. Introducing real-world conditi…
Danial Ramezani, Mostafa Abouei Ardakan, Mohamadreza Dehghani Ahmadabad
Passive management has increasingly won popularity over the past few years because of its advantages, such as lower management fees and transaction costs. Index tracking endeavors to reproduce the performance of an index with smaller sets of assets. In this paper, a novel formulation is proposed that is not only more robust than the exist…
Ati S Sharma
The cost of holding a suboptimal portfolio instead of the Kelly-optimal one admits two exact relative-entropy representations. Under the true measure, the expected log-wealth shortfall equals the KL divergence from the true measure to the measure under which the suboptimal portfolio would be optimal. Under that measure, the suboptimal por…
Bartosz Ziółko, Kacper Dobrzeniewski
In this study, we examine the opportunities brought by Large Language Models (LLMs) to various aspects of fundamental analysis of companies based on their reports as well as data and documents describing macroeconomic situation like GDP and inflation changes as well as documents filled to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) …
Anders G Frøseth
We characterise minimum-distortion wealth taxation under two contrasting normative criteria within a Fokker-Planck framework on log-wealth: the JKO free-energy gap, an information-theoretic measure aligned with the Mirrleesian decision-distortion tradition, and the squared 2-Wasserstein distance from the no-tax distribution at horizon $T$…
Alejandro Rodriguez Dominguez
When a portfolio is conditioned on a minimal set of observable drivers under which its assets become mutually independent over the investment horizon, the dynamic investment problem acquires a distinctive geometric structure. We study continuous-time portfolio choice in this setting. The conditioning representation, rather than the asset …
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open-access interoperability. Paper metadata is sourced from the arXiv API; StockTools is not affiliated with or endorsed by arXiv. All rights to each paper remain with its authors. Educational only — not financial advice.