AlphaForgeBench: Benchmarking End-to-End Trading Strategy Design with Large Language Models

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a surge of financial benchmarks, evolving from static knowledge evaluation toward interactive trading simulations. However, existing frameworks for evaluating real-time trading largely overlook a critical failure mode: the severe behavioral instability of LLMs in sequential decision-making under financial uncertainty. Through extensive experiments, we show that when deployed as trading agents, LLMs exhibit extreme run-to-run variance, generate inconsistent action sequences even under deterministic decoding, and frequently produce irrational action flipping across adjacent time steps. We attribute these behaviors to the stateless autoregressive nature of LLMs, which lack persistent memory of prior actions, together with their sensitivity to continuous-to-discrete action mappings in portfolio allocation tasks. These deficiencies fundamentally undermine the reliability and reproducibility of many existing online and offline trading benchmarks. To address these limitations, we propose AlphaForgeBench, a principled evaluation framework that redefines LLMs as quantitative researchers rather than stochastic trading agents. Instead of producing discrete trading actions, AlphaForgeBench requires models to generate executable alpha factors and compose factor-based trading strategies grounded in financial knowledge. This paradigm decouples reasoning from execution mechanics, enabling deterministic and reproducible evaluation while remaining aligned with real-world quantitative research workflows. Extensive experiments across multiple state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate that AlphaForgeBench eliminates execution-induced instability and provides a rigorous benchmark for evaluating financial reasoning, strategy formulation, and alpha discovery. Webpage at https://finbrain-lab-hkustgz.github.io/AlphaForgeBench