Papers for

investment software developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Llm agents benchmarked on forecasting quarterly earnings per share

EPSBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Earnings Forecasting

Abstract: Quarterly earnings forecasting requires an agent to connect financial evidence to the income-statement line items that produce a company's reported earnings. We introduce EPSBench, a benchmark for studying this ability across 149 firm-quarters from 86 US companies. Agents read a fixed collection of filings, earnings-call transcripts, and news, then estimate company-specific income-statement drivers with cited evidence. A shared accounting calculator converts these estimates into GAAP diluted earnings per share (EPS), providing a common basis for comparing forecast assumptions. We evaluate six models under a common harness, assessing point forecast error relative to date-matched analyst consensus and checking whether their prediction intervals achieve the stated coverage. Three models show no detectable paired difference in point forecast error from consensus, and three have higher error. Across all six models, nominal 80% intervals contain reported EPS in only 37--70% of runs that return an interval, and most misses fall above the upper bound because the forecasts run low. The driver records trace most of the error gap between models to operating-income estimates.

Wed 28 OctComputation and LanguageArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Forecasting a company's quarterly earnings involves understanding many financial details and how they add up to reported profits. The authors built a test called EPSBench where AI models try to predict quarterly earnings by reading official documents and news about companies. They compare how well these AI models do against professional human analysts. The results show some models perform about as well as analysts, but prediction intervals often underestimate actual earnings. Most errors come from estimating a key income figure called operating income.
Open → 2610.38293v1