Toward Expert Investment Teams: A Multi-Agent LLM System with Fine-Grained Trading Tasks
The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has accelerated the development of autonomous financial trading systems. While mainstream approaches deploy multi-agent systems with hierarchical decision architectures, they often rely on coarse-grained instructions that underspecify the analytical procedures, leading to degraded inference quality and reduced transparency. We propose a structured decision architecture that explicitly decomposes investment analysis into fine-grained, domain-informed tasks assigned to specialized inference modules, rather than providing abstract role-level instructions. We evaluate the proposed framework using Japanese stock data, including prices, financial statements, news, and macro information, under a leakage-controlled backtesting setting. Experimental results, validated through bootstrap confidence intervals, multiple-testing corrections, and subperiod stability analysis, demonstrate that fine-grained task decomposition significantly improves risk-adjusted returns compared to conventional coarse-grained designs. Crucially, further analysis of intermediate agent outputs suggests that semantic alignment between analytical outputs and downstream decision layers is a critical driver of system performance, consistent with a structured regularization interpretation. Moreover, we conduct standard portfolio optimization, exploiting low correlation with the stock index and the variance of each system’s output, achieving superior risk-adjusted performance. These findings contribute to the design of structured inference architectures and task decomposition strategies for LLM-based financial decision systems.
Authors
- Takanobu Kawahara
- Stefan Zohren (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3392-0394)
- Kunihiro Miyazaki
- Stephen Roberts
Institutions
- Atomi University (JP)
- Digital Hollywood University (JP)
- University of Oxford (GB)
- Science Oxford (GB)
Publication Details
- Journal
- The Journal of Financial Data Science
- Published
- 2026-06-16
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3905/jfds.2026.008
- Primary Topic
- Stock Market Forecasting Methods
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00