ValueAlpha: Agreement-Gated Stress Testing of LLM-Judged Investment Rationales Before Returns Are Observable

arXiv:2604.25224v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long-horizon investment decisions create a pre-realization evaluation problem: realized returns are the eventual arbiter of investment quality, but they arrive too late and are too noisy to guide many model-development and governance decisions. LLM judges offer a tempting substitute for pre-deployment evaluation of AI-finance systems, but unvalidated judges may reward verbosity, confidence, or rubric mimicry rather than financial judgment. This paper introduces textbfValueAlpha, a preregistered agreement-gated stress-test protocol for deciding when LLM-judged investment-rationale claims are publishable, qualified, or invalid.
In a controlled market-state capital-allocation prototype with 1,000 honest decision cycles and 100 preregistered adversarial controls (1,100 trajectories, 5,500 judge calls), ValueAlpha clears the aggregate agreement gate at (barkappa_w = 0.7168) but prevents several overclaims. Lower-rank systems collapse into a tie-class, one rubric dimension fails the per-dimension gate (textttconstraint_awareness, (barkappa_w = 0.2022)), single-judge rankings are family-dependent, and terse-correct rationales receive a (Delta = -2.81) rubric-point penalty relative to honest rationales. A targeted anchor-specificity probe further shows that financial constructs such as constraint awareness are operationally load-bearing.
The contribution is therefore not a leaderboard and not a claim to measure true investment skill. ValueAlpha is a pre-calibration metrology layer for AI-finance evaluation: it determines whether a proposed LLM-judge-based investment-rationale claim is stable enough, agreed enough, and uncontaminated enough to be reported at all.