Can Blindfolded LLMs Still Trade? An Anonymization-First Framework for Portfolio Optimization

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Hauptverfasser: Jeon, Joohyoung, Lee, Hongchul
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Jeon, Joohyoung
Lee, Hongchul
author_facet Jeon, Joohyoung
Lee, Hongchul
contents For LLM trading agents to be genuinely trustworthy, they must demonstrate understanding of market dynamics rather than exploitation of memorized ticker associations. Building responsible multi-agent systems demands rigorous signal validation: proving that predictions reflect legitimate patterns, not pre-trained recall. We address two sources of spurious performance: memorization bias from ticker-specific pre-training, and survivorship bias from flawed backtesting. Our approach is to blindfold the agents--anonymizing all identifiers--and verify whether meaningful signals persist. BlindTrade anonymizes tickers and company names, and four LLM agents output scores along with reasoning. We construct a GNN graph from reasoning embeddings and trade using PPO-DSR policy. On 2025 YTD (through 2025-08-01), we achieved Sharpe 1.40 +/- 0.22 across 20 seeds and validated signal legitimacy through negative control experiments. To assess robustness beyond a single OOS window, we additionally evaluate an extended period (2024--2025), revealing market-regime dependency: the policy excels in volatile conditions but shows reduced alpha in trending bull markets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_17692
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can Blindfolded LLMs Still Trade? An Anonymization-First Framework for Portfolio Optimization
Jeon, Joohyoung
Lee, Hongchul
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Finance
Portfolio Management
For LLM trading agents to be genuinely trustworthy, they must demonstrate understanding of market dynamics rather than exploitation of memorized ticker associations. Building responsible multi-agent systems demands rigorous signal validation: proving that predictions reflect legitimate patterns, not pre-trained recall. We address two sources of spurious performance: memorization bias from ticker-specific pre-training, and survivorship bias from flawed backtesting. Our approach is to blindfold the agents--anonymizing all identifiers--and verify whether meaningful signals persist. BlindTrade anonymizes tickers and company names, and four LLM agents output scores along with reasoning. We construct a GNN graph from reasoning embeddings and trade using PPO-DSR policy. On 2025 YTD (through 2025-08-01), we achieved Sharpe 1.40 +/- 0.22 across 20 seeds and validated signal legitimacy through negative control experiments. To assess robustness beyond a single OOS window, we additionally evaluate an extended period (2024--2025), revealing market-regime dependency: the policy excels in volatile conditions but shows reduced alpha in trending bull markets.
title Can Blindfolded LLMs Still Trade? An Anonymization-First Framework for Portfolio Optimization
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Finance
Portfolio Management
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17692