AI Investing
Agent Evaluation
Quant Research
September 14, 2026
Alpha Without Prediction
Pragadeesh VS
Language models cannot forecast prices, and the honest literature stopped pretending otherwise. Three 2026 studies dismantled the field's headline results, and a live fleet of autonomous trading agents lost $217,000 across 7.5 million model calls while converging onto the same trade. What survives is not forecasting: agents do not raise your skill per bet, they raise how many times you can use it. Eleven signal families graded durable, decaying, unproven or illusory, with the six tests each one has to pass.
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