{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/time-travel-is-cheating-going-live-with","title":"Time Travel is Cheating: Going Live with DeepFund for Real-Time Fund Investment Benchmarking","arxiv_id":"2505.11065","date":"2025-05-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Changlun Li","Yao Shi","Chen Wang","Qiqi Duan","Runke Ruan","Weijie Huang","Haonan Long","Lijun Huang","Yuyu Luo","Nan Tang"],"abstract":"Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable capabilities across financial tasks, including financial report summarization, earnings call transcript analysis, and asset classification. However, their real-world effectiveness in managing complex fund investment remains inadequately assessed. A fundamental limitation of existing benchmarks for evaluating LLM-driven trading strategies is their reliance on historical back-testing, inadvertently enabling LLMs to \"time travel\"-leveraging future information embedded in their training corpora, thus resulting in possible information leakage and overly optimistic performance estimates. To address this issue, we introduce DeepFund, a live fund benchmark tool designed to rigorously evaluate LLM in real-time market conditions. Utilizing a multi-agent architecture, DeepFund connects directly with real-time stock market data-specifically data published after each model pretraining cutoff-to ensure fair and leakage-free evaluations. Empirical tests on nine flagship LLMs from leading global institutions across multiple investment dimensions-including ticker-level analysis, investment decision-making, portfolio management, and risk control-reveal significant practical challenges. Notably, even cutting-edge models such as DeepSeek-V3 and Claude-3.7-Sonnet incur net trading losses within DeepFund real-time evaluation environment, underscoring the present limitations of LLMs for active fund management. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUSTDial/DeepFund.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11065v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11065v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"time-travel-is-cheating-going-live-with","repo_url":"https://github.com/hkustdial/deepfund","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"benchmarking","task_name":"Benchmarking"},{"task_slug":"management","task_name":"Management"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2505.11065","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2505.11065"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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