# Can Agentic Trading Systems Pay for Their Own Intelligence?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10286 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10286/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Financial trading and forecasting agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 25 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jul 2026.

## 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, 25 of 25)

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- [Is Your Code Generated by ChatGPT Really Correct? Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01210/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19348/) (2026)
- [BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17564/) (2023)
- [FrugalGPT: How to Use Large Language Models While Reducing Cost and Improving Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05176/) (2023)
- [RouteLLM: Learning to Route LLMs with Preference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18665/) (2024)
- [TradingAgents: Multi-Agents LLM Financial Trading Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20138/) (2024)
- [FinMem: A Performance-Enhanced LLM Trading Agent with Layered Memory and Character Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13743/) (2023)
- [TRAJECT-Bench:A Trajectory-Aware Benchmark for Evaluating Agentic Tool Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04550/) (2025)
- [Designing Heterogeneous LLM Agents for Financial Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05799/) (2024)
- [Reasoning in Token Economies: Budget-Aware Evaluation of LLM Reasoning Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06461/) (2024)
- [StockBench: Can LLM Agents Trade Stocks Profitably In Real-world Markets?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02209/) (2025)
- [Cost-of-Pass: An Economic Framework for Evaluating Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13359/) (2025)
- [CostBench: Evaluating Multi-Turn Cost-Optimal Planning and Adaptation in Dynamic Environments for LLM Tool-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02734/) (2025)
- [Efficient Agents: Building Effective Agents While Reducing Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02694/) (2025)
- [AI-Trader: Benchmarking Autonomous Agents in Real-Time Financial Markets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10971/) (2025)
- [HedgeAgents: A Balanced-aware Multi-agent Financial Trading System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13165/) (2025)
- [Time Travel is Cheating: Going Live with DeepFund for Real-Time Fund Investment Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11065/) (2025)
- [LLM-Powered Multi-Agent System for Automated Crypto Portfolio Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00826/) (2025)
- [AlphaAgents: Large Language Model based Multi-Agents for Equity Portfolio Constructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11152/) (2025)
- [ThriftLLM: On Cost-Effective Selection of Large Language Models for Classification Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04901/) (2025)
- [Controlling Performance and Budget of a Centralized Multi-agent LLM System with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02755/) (2025)
- [MASS: Muli-agent simulation scaling for portfolio construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10278/) (2025)
- [Token Economics for LLM Agents: A Dual-View Study from Computing and Economics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09104/) (2026)
- [FinWorld: An All-in-One Open-Source Platform for End-to-End Financial AI Research and Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02292/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used in trading systems, where model reasoning, tool use, and continual decisions incur costs that are expected to produce trading value. Existing evaluations typically report performance metrics, but rarely examine agentic viability: whether dynamic LLM-mediated decisions convert their induced costs into measurable incremental profit. To apply this criterion, we introduce TradeLens, a trace-grounded diagnostic toolkit for evaluating agentic trading systems from their trading records, runtime traces, and deployment configurations. It reconstructs trading trajectories, attributes profit and cost to interpretable evidence, and diagnoses whether and why an agent pays for its own intelligence. We conduct extensive analysis across backbone models, capital scales, trading frequencies, and system architectures, together with deployment discussion. Our results show that viability hinges on intelligence-to-profit conversion: models exhibit different failure patterns, such as poor asset selection in DeepSeek-V3.2 and negative timing in GLM-4.7, while capital scale, trading frequency, and architecture matter primarily in these runs, especially through their effects on decision-attributed timing value. These findings reframe the evaluation of LLMbased trading agents from capability-centric performance ranking to trace-grounded diagnosis of intelligence-to-profit conversion. Our code is available at https://github.com/ParadooxAI/TradeLens.