AI is no longer just predicting stocks; it is autonomously inventing new financial theories.
This agent executed the full hypothesis discovery loop, finding signals with genuine incremental information that survived strict novelty tests. It proves AI can move from data processing to generating peer-review-quality scientific hypotheses.
Can AI Do Financial Research? LLM-Guided Hypothesis Discovery in Asset Pricing
SSRN · 6569258
We study whether an AI research agent can autonomously execute the hypothesis discovery loop in empirical asset pricing. We place a large language model inside a human-designed research environment comprising a symbolic language of interpretable accounting formulas, an automated validation layer, and a fixed empirical evaluation pipeline. The agent searches over interactions between economic themes such as profitability, investment, valuation, and quality, and updates its proposals over successi