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abstract indexed · arXiv 2609.17632 · updated 2026-10-18

EvolveTrade: Experience-Driven Policy Refinement for Self-Evolving LLM Trading Agents

First page of EvolveTrade: Experience-Driven Policy Refinement for Self-Evolving LLM Trading Agents
From the original paper · arXiv 2609.17632Page 1. Select the image to read the PDF.

The method replaces static hand-written system prompts governing tool use with a prompt-as-policy that a separate Policy Agent revises after each interval using decision traces and realized feedback, while the backbone LLM stays frozen. Cost is modest and infrastructure-compatible: extra LLM calls for trace review and policy rewriting, trace storage, and a more complex deployment loop with versioned prompts. Failure modes include overfitting the policy to recent market regimes or noisy backtests, reward hacking where the policy inflates simulated metrics without real edge, compounding prompt drift that degrades stability, and the risk that reported gains do not survive transaction costs, slippage, or out-of-sample live trading.

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recommendation
test
research area
tool use
technical change
Self-evolving system-prompt policies for tool-use agents
published
2026-09-15

The technique runs on fixed API-scale models with no training, but its gains are validated only on trading benchmarks, so the reader should pilot the prompt-evolution loop on their own agent workload rather than adopt it outright.

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  1. claim 01Paperraft inference
    Read the brief interpretation

    The method replaces static hand-written system prompts governing tool use with a prompt-as-policy that a separate Policy Agent revises after each interval using decision traces and realized feedback, while the backbone LLM stays frozen. Cost is modest and infrastructure-compatible: extra LLM calls for trace review and policy rewriting, trace storage, and a more complex deployment loop with versioned prompts. Failure modes include overfitting the policy to recent market regimes or noisy backtests, reward hacking where the policy inflates simulated metrics without real edge, compounding prompt drift that degrades stability, and the risk that reported gains do not survive transaction costs, slippage, or out-of-sample live trading.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

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  2. claim 02Paperraft inference

    Improved Sharpe Ratio and Cumulative Return over fixed-policy LLM baselines in most evaluated settings, across two LLM backbones; no multiplicative factor reported.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

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quality

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arXiv 2609.17632

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