Investor's Last Exam: Can AI Agents Do Equity Investment Without Seeing the Future?
Abstract: Financial 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.