History Rhymes: Macro-Contextual Retrieval for Robust Financial Forecasting

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Khanna, Sarthak, Berger, Armin, Chopra, Muskaan, Berghaus, David, Sifa, Rafet
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866917083040710656
author Khanna, Sarthak
Berger, Armin
Chopra, Muskaan
Berghaus, David
Sifa, Rafet
author_facet Khanna, Sarthak
Berger, Armin
Chopra, Muskaan
Berghaus, David
Sifa, Rafet
contents Financial markets are inherently non-stationary: structural breaks and macroeconomic regime shifts often cause forecasting models to fail when deployed out of distribution (OOD). Conventional multimodal approaches that simply fuse numerical indicators and textual sentiment rarely adapt to such shifts. We introduce macro-contextual retrieval, a retrieval-augmented forecasting framework that grounds each prediction in historically analogous macroeconomic regimes. The method jointly embeds macro indicators (e.g., CPI, unemployment, yield spread, GDP growth) and financial news sentiment in a shared similarity space, enabling causal retrieval of precedent periods during inference without retraining. Trained on seventeen years of S&P 500 data (2007-2023) and evaluated OOD on AAPL (2024) and XOM (2024), the framework consistently narrows the CV to OOD performance gap. Macro-conditioned retrieval achieves the only positive out-of-sample trading outcomes (AAPL: PF=1.18, Sharpe=0.95; XOM: PF=1.16, Sharpe=0.61), while static numeric, text-only, and naive multimodal baselines collapse under regime shifts. Beyond metric gains, retrieved neighbors form interpretable evidence chains that correspond to recognizable macro contexts, such as inflationary or yield-curve inversion phases, supporting causal interpretability and transparency. By operationalizing the principle that "financial history may not repeat, but it often rhymes," this work demonstrates that macro-aware retrieval yields robust, explainable forecasts under distributional change. All datasets, models, and source code are publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09754
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle History Rhymes: Macro-Contextual Retrieval for Robust Financial Forecasting
Khanna, Sarthak
Berger, Armin
Chopra, Muskaan
Berghaus, David
Sifa, Rafet
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Financial markets are inherently non-stationary: structural breaks and macroeconomic regime shifts often cause forecasting models to fail when deployed out of distribution (OOD). Conventional multimodal approaches that simply fuse numerical indicators and textual sentiment rarely adapt to such shifts. We introduce macro-contextual retrieval, a retrieval-augmented forecasting framework that grounds each prediction in historically analogous macroeconomic regimes. The method jointly embeds macro indicators (e.g., CPI, unemployment, yield spread, GDP growth) and financial news sentiment in a shared similarity space, enabling causal retrieval of precedent periods during inference without retraining. Trained on seventeen years of S&P 500 data (2007-2023) and evaluated OOD on AAPL (2024) and XOM (2024), the framework consistently narrows the CV to OOD performance gap. Macro-conditioned retrieval achieves the only positive out-of-sample trading outcomes (AAPL: PF=1.18, Sharpe=0.95; XOM: PF=1.16, Sharpe=0.61), while static numeric, text-only, and naive multimodal baselines collapse under regime shifts. Beyond metric gains, retrieved neighbors form interpretable evidence chains that correspond to recognizable macro contexts, such as inflationary or yield-curve inversion phases, supporting causal interpretability and transparency. By operationalizing the principle that "financial history may not repeat, but it often rhymes," this work demonstrates that macro-aware retrieval yields robust, explainable forecasts under distributional change. All datasets, models, and source code are publicly available.
title History Rhymes: Macro-Contextual Retrieval for Robust Financial Forecasting
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09754