Hedge-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks Pertaining to Financial Reasoning

arXiv:2606.03918v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern AI agents are increasingly capable of routine financial-analysis tasks such as retrieving documents and updating spreadsheets. A harder challenge is forecasting an unknown future from incomplete information. Public markets provide a natural testbed: analysts routinely predict discrete events with information from that point in time. We present Hedge-Bench, a benchmark of 92 real-world environments derived from hedge fund analysts' reasoning traces paired with subsequently resolved prediction questions. Agents reason from frozen information snapshots, and their forecasts are evaluated against real-world outcomes. Across 11 frontier models and three trials per environment, joint success rates, which require both a correct forecast and over 60% research coverage, range from 2.54 to 31.52%. Using GRPO with turn-level credit assignment, we train Muse-Glimmer on 165 environments, increasing coverage on 22 held-out environments from 17.17% to 33.36% at low reasoning effort and from 30.19% to 47.02% at extra-high effort. The trained model at low effort also exceeds the base model's extra-high-effort coverage while using 47.9% fewer