Can Large Language Models Beat Wall Street? Unveiling the Potential of AI in Stock Selection
Open accessAbstract
This paper introduces MarketSenseAI, an innovative framework leveraging GPT-4's advanced reasoning for selecting stocks in financial markets. By integrating Chain of Thought and In-Context Learning, MarketSenseAI analyzes diverse data sources, including market trends, news, fundamentals, and macroeconomic factors, to emulate expert investment decision-making. The development, implementation, and validation of the framework are elaborately discussed, underscoring its capability to generate actionable and interpretable investment signals. A notable feature of this work is employing GPT-4 both as a predictive mechanism and signal evaluator, revealing the significant impact of the AI-generated explanations on signal accuracy, reliability and acceptance. Through empirical testing on the competitive S&P 100 stocks over a 15-month period, MarketSenseAI demonstrated exceptional performance, delivering excess alpha of 10% to 30% and achieving a cumulative return of up to 72% over the period, while maintaining a risk profile comparable to the broader market. Our findings highlight the transformative potential of Large Language Models in financial decision-making, marking a significant leap in integrating generative AI into financial analytics and investment strategies.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In [10] and [56], win rate is used to measure proportion of profitable trades out of all executed trades.
“Meanwhile, [10] and [56] use the win rate to measure the proportion of profitable trades out of all executed trades.”
From Large Language Model Agent in Financial Trading: A Survey (2026) · cites this paper as [10]
Cites
Efron, B., & Tibshirani, R. (1986) · Statistical Science · doi:10.1214/ss/1177013815 · Cited by 6,033 · see citing works
Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
Wei, J., Wang, X., Schuurmans, D., Bosma, M., Ichter, B., Xia, F., Chi, E., Le, Q., & Zhou, D. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2201.11903 · Cited by 4,263 · see citing works
The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Its Critics
Malkiel, B. G. (2003) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/089533003321164958 · Cited by 2,161 · see citing works
Experimental evidence on the productivity effects of generative artificial intelligence
Noy, S., & Zhang, W. (2023) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.adh2586 · Cited by 2,150 · see citing works
MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language UnderstandingPreprint
Song, K., Tan, X., Qin, T., Lu, J., & Liu, T. (2020) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2004.09297 · Cited by 713 · see citing works
FinBERT: Financial Sentiment Analysis with Pre-trained Language Models
Araci, D. (2019) · arXiv · Cited by 602 · see citing works
Momentum and Autocorrelation in Stock Returns
Lewellen, J. W. (2002) · Review of Financial Studies · doi:10.1093/rfs/15.2.533 · Cited by 491 · see citing works
Can ChatGPT forecast stock price movements? Return predictability and large language models
Lopez-Lira, A., & Tang, Y. (2026) · Journal of Financial Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jfineco.2026.104335 · Cited by 425 · see citing works
BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance
Wu, S., Irsoy, O., Lu, S., Dabravolski, V., Dredze, M., Gehrmann, S., Kambadur, P., Rosenberg, D., & Mann, G. (2023) · arXiv · Cited by 357 · see citing works
How Close is ChatGPT to Human Experts? Comparison Corpus, Evaluation, and Detection
Guo, B., Zhang, X., Wang, Z., Jiang, M., Nie, J., Ding, Y., Yue, J., & Wu, Y. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2301.07597 · Cited by 318 · see citing works
A Survey on In-context Learning
Dong, Q., Li, L., Dai, D., Zheng, C., Ma, J., Li, R., Xia, H., Xu, J., Wu, Z., Liu, T., et al. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2301.00234 · Cited by 248 · see citing works
Alshami, A., Elsayed, M., Ali, E., Eltoukhy, A. E. E., & Zayed, T. (2023) · Systems · doi:10.3390/systems11070351 · Cited by 202 · see citing works
Transforming sentiment analysis in the financial domain with ChatGPT
Fatouros, G., Soldatos, J. K., Kouroumali, K., Makridis, G., & Kyriazis, D. (2023) · Machine Learning with Applications · doi:10.1016/j.mlwa.2023.100508 · Cited by 200 · see citing works
Self-citationTemporal Data Meets LLM - Explainable Financial Time Series ForecastingPreprint
Yu, X., Chen, Z., Ling, Y., Dong, S., Liu, Z., & Lu, Y.-B. (2023) · arXiv.org · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2306.11025 · Cited by 145 · see citing works
Financial Institutions, Markets, and Money.
Gregory, O. K., Kidwell, D. S., & Peterson, R. L. (1982) · The Journal of Finance · doi:10.2307/2327721 · Cited by 131 · see citing works
Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond
Greenwald, B. C. N., Kahn, J., Sonkin, P. D., & van Biema, M. (2001) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 129 · see citing works
ChatGPT: Unlocking the future of NLP in finance
Zaremba, A., & Demir, E. (2023) · Modern Finance · doi:10.61351/mf.v1i1.43 · Cited by 121 · see citing works
Sentiment trading with large language models
Kirtac, K., & Germano, G. (2024) · Finance Research Letters · doi:10.1016/j.frl.2024.105227 · Cited by 115 · see citing works
Do LLMs Exhibit Human-like Response Biases? A Case Study in Survey Design
Tjuatja, L., Chen, V., Wu, T., Talwalkwar, A., & Neubig, G. (2024) · Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics · doi:10.1162/tacl_a_00685 · Cited by 100 · see citing works
Bloated Disclosures: Can ChatGPT Help Investors Process Information?Preprint
Kim, A. G., Muhn, M., & Nikolaev, V. V. (2023) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.4425527 · Cited by 92 · see citing works
ChatGPT: Unlocking the Future of NLP in FinancePreprint
Zaremba, A., & Demir, E. (2023) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.4323643 · Cited by 65 · see citing works
ChatGPT Informed Graph Neural Network for Stock Movement PredictionPreprint
Chen, Z., Zheng, L., Cheng, L., Yuan, J., & Zhu, D. (2023) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.4464002 · Cited by 56 · see citing works
Kotios, D., Makridis, G., Fatouros, G., & Kyriazis, D. (2022) · Journal Of Big Data · doi:10.1186/s40537-022-00651-x · Cited by 52 · see citing works
Self-citationThe role of Reddit in the GameStop short squeeze
Anand, A., & Pathak, J. (2021) · Economics Letters · doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2021.110249 · Cited by 45 · see citing works
DeepVaR: a framework for portfolio risk assessment leveraging probabilistic deep neural networks
Fatouros, G., Makridis, G., Kotios, D., Soldatos, J. K., Filippakis, M. Ε., & Kyriazis, D. (2022) · Digital Finance · doi:10.1007/s42521-022-00050-0 · Cited by 36 · see citing works
Self-citationEstimating the impact of good news on stock market volatility
Malik, F. (2011) · Applied Financial Economics · doi:10.1080/09603107.2010.534063 · Cited by 33 · see citing works
Behavioral biases in pension fund trustees’ decision making
Weiss‐Cohen, L., Ayton, P., Clacher, I., & Thoma, V. (2019) · Review of Behavioral Finance · doi:10.1108/rbf-05-2018-0049 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
Can GPT models be Financial Analysts? An Evaluation of ChatGPT and GPT-4 on mock CFA ExamsPreprint
Callanan, E., Mbakwe, A. B., Papadimitriou, A., Pei, Y., Sibue, M., Zhu, X., Ma, Z., Liu, X., & Shah, S. (2023) · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.08678 · Cited by 15 · see citing works
Does 0DTE Options Trading Increase Volatility?Preprint
Brogaard, J., Han, J.-H., & Won, P. Y. (2023) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.4426358 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
Drawdown Measures: Are They All the Same?
Korn, O., Möller, P. M., & Schwehm, C. (2022) · The Journal of Portfolio Management · doi:10.3905/jpm.2022.1.346 · Cited by 7 · see citing works
Fusion-Eval: Integrating Assistant Evaluators with LLMs
Shu, L., Wichers, N., Luo, L., Zhu, Y., Liu, Y., Chen, J., & Meng, L. (2024) · Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) · doi:10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-industry.18 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
Atreides, K., & Kelley, D. J. (2023) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.4568851 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
Fusion-Eval: Integrating Assistant Evaluators with LLMsPreprint
Shu, L., Wichers, N., Luo, L., et al. (2023) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2311.09204 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Opportunities and Challenges of Generative-AI in Finance
Desai, A. P., Ravi, T., Luqman, M., Mallya, G., Kota, N., & Yadav, P. (2024) · IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData) · doi:10.1109/bigdata62323.2024.10825658 · Cited by 29 · see citing works
Generative AI Solutions to Empower Financial Firms
Dubey, S. S., Astvansh, V., & Kopalle, P. K. (2024) · Journal of Public Policy & Marketing · doi:10.1177/07439156241311300 · Cited by 27 · see citing works
LLM-Powered AI Agent Systems and Their Applications in Industry
Liang, G., & Tong, Q. (2025) · IEEE World AI IoT Congress (AIIoT) · doi:10.1109/aiiot65859.2025.11105299 · Cited by 32 · see citing works
Kang, J.-W., & Choi, S. (2025) · Electronics · doi:10.3390/electronics14061090 · Cited by 17 · see citing works
AI in Investment Analysis: LLMs for Equity Stock Ratings
Papasotiriou, K., Sood, S., Reynolds, S., & Balch, T. R. (2024) · ACM International Conference on AI in Finance (ICAIF) · doi:10.1145/3677052.3698694 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
Large Language Model Agent in Financial Trading: A Survey
Ding, H., Li, Y., Wang, J., Chen, H., Guo, D., & Zhang, Y. (2026) · Proceedings of the 2026 9th International Conference on Computers in Management and Business · doi:10.1145/3802463.3802475 · Cited by 10 · see citing works
Industrial large model: A survey
Zhou, J., Cao, Y., Lu, Q., Zhang, Y., Liu, C., Zhang, S., & Qu, J. (2024) · MATEC Web of Conferences · doi:10.1051/matecconf/202440110009 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
Cui, T., Ye, Y., Li, Y., Du, N., Song, X., Zhu, Y., Yang, X., & Štrbac, G. (2025) · Energy and AI · doi:10.1016/j.egyai.2025.100562 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
Xu, T., Piao, Z. H., Mukai, T., Murayama, Y., & Izumi, K. (2025) · Intelligent Systems with Applications · doi:10.1016/j.iswa.2025.200496 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Reasoning or Overthinking: Evaluating Large Language Models on Financial Sentiment Analysis
Vamvourellis, D., & Mehta, D. B. (2025) · ACM International Conference on AI in Finance (ICAIF) · doi:10.1145/3768292.3770341 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
Comparative Analysis and Evaluation of SLMs and LLMs for Stock Price Movement Prediction
van der Leij, K., Manias, G., Leung, Y. K., & van den Heuvel, W. (2025) · IFIP advances in information and communication technology · doi:10.1007/978-3-031-96235-6_21 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
Aldridge, I., & Kim, D. (2024) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.4999492 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
Косован, О., & Datsko, M. (2024) · Цифрова економіка та економічна безпека · doi:10.32782/dees.10-35
No matter your financial literacy: Simplicity wins when choosing a fund
Gong, Z. F., & Müller, S. (2026) · Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance · doi:10.1016/j.jbef.2026.101188
AI's Impact on Financial Services, Auditing, and Investment Strategies
Irfan, M., Dias, R., Hooda, J., Singh, K. A., & Bang, S. S. (2025) · Advances in computational intelligence and robotics book series · doi:10.4018/979-8-3373-0129-7.ch008
Generalizable Multi-Agent Framework for Quantitative Trading of US Education Funds
Xu, K., Zhang, Z., Wilson, A., Yu, Q., Zhou, L., & Jiang, Y. (2024) · Innovations in Applied Engineering and Technology · doi:10.62836/iaet.v3i1.362
Predicting Business Angel Early-Stage Decision Making Using AIPreprint
Katcharovski, Y., & Maxwell, A. (2025) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.5342945
Predicting Business Angel Early-Stage Decision Making using AIPreprint
Katcharovski, Y., & Maxwell, A. (2025) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.5347382
Mitigating upside gains and downside losses through AI investment and greenness of stocks
Shabbir, B., Ashraf, N., Khurshid, J., Tariq, A., Jamil, L., & Khalid, Z. (2025) · Discover Sustainability · doi:10.1007/s43621-025-01377-5
Zhang, H., Kong, H., & Wang, S. (2026) · Lecture notes in computer science · doi:10.1007/978-981-95-4158-4_13
FALLMAS: An LLM-Based Multi-Agent System for Automated Financial Analysis and Strategic Reporting
Bouchtib, H., Tabaa, M., Karboub, K., & Hamlich, M. (2026) · IEEE International Multidisciplinary Conference on Engineering Technology (IMCET) · doi:10.1109/imcet69180.2026.11503762
Makridis, G., Fragiadakis, G., Oliveira, J., Saraiva, T., Mavrepis, P., Fatouros, G., & Kyriazis, D. (2026) · Journal of artificial intelligence for sustainable development. · doi:10.69828/4d4kwm
Self-citationOn Advancing Elliott Waves Technical Analysis with AI Agents
Wawer, M., & Chudziak, J. A. (2026) · Lecture notes in computer science · doi:10.1007/978-3-032-25029-2_10
Shen, J.-H., & Lu, C.-F. (2026) · Smart innovation, systems and technologies · doi:10.1007/978-3-032-24063-7_11
Generative AI-Enhanced Sector-Based Investment Portfolio Construction
Romanko, O., Voronina, A., Cao, R., Kwon, R. H., & Mendoza‐Arriaga, R. (2026) · Operations Research Forum · doi:10.1007/s43069-026-00686-3
Sentiment-Driven ETF Decision: A Fully LLM-Centric Agent Framework with Dynamic Constraint Prompts
Tan, Z., & Wu, Y. (2026) · Lecture notes in networks and systems · doi:10.1007/978-3-032-23396-7_10
- Authors
- Fatouros, G., Metaxas, K., Soldatos, J., & Kyriazis, D.
- Affiliations
- University of Piraeus (GR)
- Corresponding author
- Fatouros, Georgios
- Venue
- SSRN Electronic Journal
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2024
- ISSN
- 1556-5068 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4391286169
- Cited by
- 25
- References
- 31
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 7
- Type
- posted content
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Locations
- SSRN Electronic Journal (acceptedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Stock Market Forecasting Methods
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Finance › Financial Markets and Investment Strategies
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Accounting › Financial Analysis and Corporate Governance
- Keywords
- large language models, stock selection, GPT-4, chain-of-thought prompting, in-context learning, investment decision-making, investment signals, S&P 100 stocks, AI-generated explanations, financial analytics
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review