# Not All News Is Equal: Topic- and Event-Conditional Sentiment from Finetuned LLMs for Aluminum Price Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09085 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09085/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [FinGPT: Instruction Tuning Benchmark for Open-Source Large Language Models in Financial Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04793/) (2023)
- [A Comparative Analysis of Instruction Fine-Tuning LLMs for Financial Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02476/) (2024)
- [Fine-tuning of lightweight large language models for sentiment classification on heterogeneous financial textual data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00946/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

By capturing the prevailing sentiment and market mood, textual data has become increasingly vital for forecasting commodity prices, particularly in metal markets. However, the effectiveness of lightweight, finetuned large language models (LLMs) in extracting predictive signals for aluminum prices, and the specific market conditions under which these signals are most informative, remains under-explored. This study generates monthly sentiment scores from English and Chinese news headlines (Reuters, Dow Jones Newswires, and China News Service) and integrates them with traditional tabular data, including base metal indices, exchange rates, inflation rates, and energy prices. We evaluate the predictive performance and economic utility of these models through long-short simulations on the Shanghai Metal Exchange from 2007 to 2024. Our results demonstrate that during periods of high volatility, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models incorporating sentiment data from a finetuned Qwen3 model (Sharpe ratio 1.04) significantly outperform baseline models using tabular data alone (Sharpe ratio 0.23). Subsequent analysis elucidates the nuanced roles of news sources, topics, and event types in aluminum price forecasting.