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Behavioral Consistency Validation for LLM Agents: An Analysis of Trading-Style Switching through Stock-Market Simulation

Author

Listed:
  • Zeping Li
  • Guancheng Wan
  • Keyang Chen
  • Yu Chen
  • Yiwen Zhao
  • Philip Torr
  • Guangnan Ye
  • Zhenfei Yin
  • Hongfeng Chai

Abstract

Recent works have increasingly applied Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents in financial stock market simulations to test if micro-level behaviors aggregate into macro-level phenomena. However, a crucial question arises: Do LLM agents' behaviors align with real market participants? This alignment is key to the validity of simulation results. To explore this, we select a financial stock market scenario to test behavioral consistency. Investors are typically classified as fundamental or technical traders, but most simulations fix strategies at initialization, failing to reflect real-world trading dynamics. In this work, we assess whether agents' strategy switching aligns with financial theory, providing a framework for this evaluation. We operationalize four behavioral-finance drivers-loss aversion, herding, wealth differentiation, and price misalignment-as personality traits set via prompting and stored long-term. In year-long simulations, agents process daily price-volume data, trade under a designated style, and reassess their strategy every 10 trading days. We introduce four alignment metrics and use Mann-Whitney U tests to compare agents' style-switching behavior with financial theory. Our results show that recent LLMs' switching behavior is only partially consistent with behavioral-finance theories, highlighting the need for further refinement in aligning agent behavior with financial theory.

Suggested Citation

  • Zeping Li & Guancheng Wan & Keyang Chen & Yu Chen & Yiwen Zhao & Philip Torr & Guangnan Ye & Zhenfei Yin & Hongfeng Chai, 2026. "Behavioral Consistency Validation for LLM Agents: An Analysis of Trading-Style Switching through Stock-Market Simulation," Papers 2602.07023, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2026.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2602.07023
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    References listed on IDEAS

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