# Learning to Trade Like an Expert: Cognitive Fine-Tuning for Stable Financial Reasoning in Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16862 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16862/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 18 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17564/) (2023)
- [Solving math word problems with process- and outcome-based feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14275/) (2022)
- [DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19437/) (2024)
- [Textbooks Are All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11644/) (2023)
- [FinBERT: Financial Sentiment Analysis with Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10063/) (2019)
- [Quiet-STaR: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Think Before Speaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09629/) (2024)
- [ConvFinQA: Exploring the Chain of Numerical Reasoning in Conversational Finance Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03849/) (2022)
- [TradingAgents: Multi-Agents LLM Financial Trading Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20138/) (2024)
- [MultiHiertt: Numerical Reasoning over Multi Hierarchical Tabular and Textual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01347/) (2022)
- [DISC-FinLLM: A Chinese Financial Large Language Model based on Multiple Experts Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15205/) (2023)
- [Large Language Model Agent in Financial Trading: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06361/) (2024)
- [StockBench: Can LLM Agents Trade Stocks Profitably In Real-world Markets?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02209/) (2025)
- [When AI Meets Finance (StockAgent): Large Language Model-based Stock Trading in Simulated Real-world Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18957/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Agentic Trading: When LLM Agents Meet Financial Markets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19337/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent deployments of large language models (LLMs) as autonomous trading agents raise questions about whether financial decision-making competence generalizes beyond specific market patterns and how it should be trained and evaluated in noisy markets lacking ground truth. We propose a structured framework for training and evaluating such models. Central to our approach is a curated, multiple-choice question (MCQ) dataset derived from classic textbooks and historical markets, verified by an AI committee, enriched with structured reasoning traces, and augmented to reduce shortcut learning. To evaluate whether performance on isolated MCQs generalizes to real-world trading, we introduce a two-stage protocol combining test-set evaluation with an MCQ-based chronological trading simulation. Extensive evaluations across market regimes provide statistically robust evidence that open models trained with our framework exhibit competitive, risk-aware behavior over time, outperform open-source baselines, and approach frontier-model performance at smaller scale. We release the dataset and evaluation framework to support further research.