# TradingAgents: Multi-Agents LLM Financial Trading Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20138 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20138/

## Key facts

- Cited by 188 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Financial trading and forecasting agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 26 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Financial trading and forecasting agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/financial-trading-and-forecasting-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10305/) (2023)
- [Multi-Agent Collaboration: Harnessing the Power of Intelligent LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03314/) (2023)
- [MedAgents: Large Language Models as Collaborators for Zero-shot Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10537/) (2023)
- [Auto-GPT for Online Decision Making: Benchmarks and Additional Opinions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02224/) (2023)
- [FinMem: A Performance-Enhanced LLM Trading Agent with Layered Memory and Character Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13743/) (2023)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Reason with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04642/) (2024)
- [A Multimodal Foundation Agent for Financial Trading: Tool-Augmented, Diversified, and Generalist](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18485/) (2024)
- [Can ChatGPT Forecast Stock Price Movements? Return Predictability and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07619/) (2023)
- [FinCon: A Synthesized LLM Multi-Agent System with Conceptual Verbal Reinforcement for Enhanced Financial Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06567/) (2024)
- [XuanYuan 2.0: A Large Chinese Financial Chat Model with Hundreds of Billions Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12002/) (2023)
- [Towards Mitigating Hallucination in Large Language Models via Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06271/) (2023)
- [Instruct-FinGPT: Financial Sentiment Analysis by Instruction Tuning of General-Purpose Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12659/) (2023)
- [Alpha-GPT: Human-AI Interactive Alpha Mining for Quantitative Investment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00016/) (2023)
- [Designing Heterogeneous LLM Agents for Financial Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05799/) (2024)
- [FinRobot: An Open-Source AI Agent Platform for Financial Applications using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14767/) (2024)
- [Learning to Generate Explainable Stock Predictions using Self-Reflective Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03659/) (2024)
- [LLMFactor: Extracting Profitable Factors through Prompts for Explainable Stock Movement Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10811/) (2024)
- [QuantAgent: Seeking Holy Grail in Trading by Self-Improving Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03755/) (2024)
- [Can Large Language Models Beat Wall Street? Unveiling the Potential of AI in Stock Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03737/) (2024)
- [On The Planning Abilities of OpenAI's o1 Models: Feasibility, Optimality, and Generalizability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19924/) (2024)
- [Integrating Stock Features and Global Information via Large Language Models for Enhanced Stock Return Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05627/) (2023)
- [Unveiling the Potential of Sentiment: Can Large Language Models Predict Chinese Stock Price Movements?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14222/) (2023)
- [Sentiment trading with large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19245/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 188)

- [A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21046/) (2025)
- [MCP-Bench: Benchmarking Tool-Using LLM Agents with Complex Real-World Tasks via MCP Servers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20453/) (2025)
- [Agentic Large Language Models, a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23037/) (2025)
- [Open Challenges in Multi-Agent Security: Towards Secure Systems of Interacting AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02077/) (2025)
- [LLM-based Agents Suffer from Hallucinations: A Survey of Taxonomy, Methods, and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18970/) (2025)
- [A Survey on the Optimization of Large Language Model-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12434/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Agent Memory in the Second Half: Towards Self-Evolving and Long-Horizon Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06052/) (2026)
- [R&D-Agent-Quant: A Multi-Agent Framework for Data-Centric Factors and Model Joint Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15155/) (2025)
- [METAL: A Multi-Agent Framework for Chart Generation with Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17651/) (2025)
- [Generative to Agentic AI: Survey, Conceptualization, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18875/) (2025)
- [Time Travel is Cheating: Going Live with DeepFund for Real-Time Fund Investment Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11065/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11575/) (2025)
- [Can LLM-based Financial Investing Strategies Outperform the Market in Long Run?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07078/) (2025)
- [On the Robustness of Agentic Function Calling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00914/) (2025)
- [Towards Enforcing Company Policy Adherence in Agentic Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16459/) (2025)
- [Your AI, Not Your View: The Bias of LLMs in Investment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20957/) (2025)
- [When Agents Trade: Live Multi-Market Trading Benchmark for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11695/) (2025)
- [TokenCake: A KV-Cache-centric Serving Framework for LLM-based Multi-Agent Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18586/) (2025)
- [QuantaAlpha: An Evolutionary Framework for LLM-Driven Alpha Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07085/) (2026)
- [Trading-R1: Financial Trading with LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11420/) (2025)
- [The Measurement Imbalance in Agentic AI Evaluation Undermines Industry Productivity Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02064/) (2025)
- [Profit Mirage: Revisiting Information Leakage in LLM-based Financial Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07920/) (2025)
- [Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI): Architectures, Taxonomies, and Evaluation of Large Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12560/) (2026)
- [Standard Benchmarks Fail -- Auditing LLM Agents in Finance Must Prioritize Risk](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15865/) (2025)
- [Inherent and emergent liability issues in LLM-based agentic systems: a principal-agent perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03255/) (2025)
- [LiveTradeBench: Seeking Real-World Alpha with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03628/) (2025)
- [Integrating Large Language Models for Automated Structural Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09754/) (2025)
- [Efficient LLM Serving for Agentic Workflows: A Data Systems Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16104/) (2026)
- [A Survey of Scaling in Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02181/) (2025)
- [Agent Trading Arena: A Study on Numerical Understanding in LLM-Based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17967/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Significant progress has been made in automated problem-solving using societies of agents powered by large language models (LLMs). In finance, efforts have largely focused on single-agent systems handling specific tasks or multi-agent frameworks independently gathering data. However, the multi-agent systems' potential to replicate real-world trading firms' collaborative dynamics remains underexplored. TradingAgents proposes a novel stock trading framework inspired by trading firms, featuring LLM-powered agents in specialized roles such as fundamental analysts, sentiment analysts, technical analysts, and traders with varied risk profiles. The framework includes Bull and Bear researcher agents assessing market conditions, a risk management team monitoring exposure, and traders synthesizing insights from debates and historical data to make informed decisions. By simulating a dynamic, collaborative trading environment, this framework aims to improve trading performance. Detailed architecture and extensive experiments reveal its superiority over baseline models, with notable improvements in cumulative returns, Sharpe ratio, and maximum drawdown, highlighting the potential of multi-agent LLM frameworks in financial trading. TradingAgents is available at https://github.com/TauricResearch/TradingAgents.