# FinDeepIndicator: Benchmarking Deep Research Agents in End-to-End Financial Indicator Construction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00764 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00764/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 23 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 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, 23 of 23)

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09516/) (2025)
- [GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12983/) (2023)
- [BrowseComp: A Simple Yet Challenging Benchmark for Browsing Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12516/) (2025)
- [FinQA: A Dataset of Numerical Reasoning over Financial Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00122/) (2021)
- [LLMs-as-Judges: A Comprehensive Survey on LLM-based Evaluation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05579/) (2024)
- [TAT-QA: A Question Answering Benchmark on a Hybrid of Tabular and Textual Content in Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07624/) (2021)
- [ProcessBench: Identifying Process Errors in Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06559/) (2024)
- [FinanceBench: A New Benchmark for Financial Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11944/) (2023)
- [ConvFinQA: Exploring the Chain of Numerical Reasoning in Conversational Finance Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03849/) (2022)
- [Deep Research Agents: A Systematic Examination And Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18096/) (2025)
- [Deep Research: A Survey of Autonomous Research Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12752/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Step-by-step Reasoning Traces: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12289/) (2025)
- [DocFinQA: A Long-Context Financial Reasoning Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06915/) (2024)
- [FinTextQA: A Dataset for Long-form Financial Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09980/) (2024)
- [FinAgentBench: A Benchmark Dataset for Agentic Retrieval in Financial Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14052/) (2025)
- [FinSearchComp: Towards a Realistic, Expert-Level Evaluation of Financial Search and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13160/) (2025)
- [SEC-QA: A Systematic Evaluation Corpus for Financial QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14394/) (2024)
- [FinChain: A Symbolic Benchmark for Verifiable Chain-of-Thought Financial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02515/) (2025)
- [FinDeepResearch: Evaluating Deep Research Agents in Rigorous Financial Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13936/) (2025)
- [FinDeepForecast: A Live Multi-Agent System for Benchmarking Deep Research Agents in Financial Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05039/) (2026)

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

- [FinFIRST: Benchmarking Search Agents for Financial Information Retrieval, Sourcing and Traceability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25192/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Financial indicators are essential tools for transforming raw financial data into interpretable measures for various downstream tasks, such as valuation, risk assessment, and economic analysis. However, existing financial benchmarks largely focus on answer-level accuracy and often assume that relevant data are already provided, leaving the assessment of the intermediate process of indicator construction underexplored. In this work, we propose FinDeepIndicator, the first benchmark dedicated to evaluating Deep Research (DR) agents in end-to-end financial indicator construction. Specifically, FinDeepIndicator evaluates DR agents across four stages in indicator construction: formula specification, data collection, indicator calculation, and answer generation, and covers fundamental, technical, and macroeconomic indicators organized into 21 fine-grained sub-categories. It contains 3,350 curated question-answer (QA) pairs derived from both U.S. and Chinese markets, 10 years of historical financial data, and 800 listed companies. Extensive experiments on search-equipped Large Language Models (LLMs) and DR agents show that, while LLMs generally perform well in formula specification, their accuracy drops substantially during data retrieval and numerical execution. DR agents consistently outperform search-equipped LLMs, yet remain unreliable in realistic financial analysis settings. These findings provide insights for developing more capable and trustworthy DR agents in finance.