FinTradeBench: A Financial Reasoning Benchmark for LLMs

Financial analysis requires reasoning over heterogeneous signals, including company fundamentals from regulatory filings and trading signals derived from market prices. However, existing financial benchmarks focus almost exclusively on regulatory filings, neglecting market dynamics and cross-signal interactions. We introduce FinTradeBench, a benchmark of 1,400 questions covering NASDAQ-100 stocks over a ten-year window. To holistically evaluate financial reasoning, FinTradeBench includes questions in three reasoning categories: fundamentals-focused, trading-signal-focused, and hybrid questions that require cross-signal reasoning. Our benchmark starts with 150 expert-authored seed questions, which are then scaled to 1400. To ensure reliable evaluation, we create a Core400 subset in which every item is expert-reviewed. In zero-shot (No-RAG) response generation, we observe that all models perform substantially worse on trading-focused questions compared to fundamental-focused questions. To identify failure causes, we evaluate LLMs under controlled settings including retrieval-based baselines, tool-assisted computation, oracle conditions, and time-series-specialized pipelines. LLMs' capabilities to do computation and evidence selection contribute most to reasoning failures. Additionally, retrieval significantly improves trading-signal reasoning but does not improve fundamental reasoning, where identifying relevant signals remains the dominant failure mode. Finally, rather than relying on a small, fine-tuned model for time-series reasoning, it is better to summarize the time-series data and leverage LLMs' reasoning capabilities.