FinBench: Time-Gated Calibration and Uncertainty Benchmarking for Agentic Financial Forecasting

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as components of agentic systems that observe, plan, and act. In finance, even "assistive" systems become decision-relevant once their outputs are used to size trades or allocate risk. A key failure mode is the confidence--competence gap: a model that is only slightly better than chance but consistently overconfident will, under typical bet-sizing rules, generate negative long-run growth. Existing benchmarks emphasize semantic understanding or point accuracy, but do not directly test probabilistic calibration under the temporal constraints and non-stationarity that define real markets. We introduce FinBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate calibration and uncertainty quality for financial forecasting in a setting that is (i) strictly time-gated to avoid look-ahead bias and (ii) evaluated with strictly proper scoring rules that penalize hallucinated confidence. FinBench tasks require models to output (a) a probability of positive return and (b) an 80% prediction interval for realized log return; evaluation uses the Brier score and the Winkler interval score, along with skill scores against hard baselines. This paper describes the benchmark specification and reports a small pilot run (one trading day; three liquid tickers; 33 forecasts) as a sanity check of the pipeline. The pilot illustrates how calibration-sensitive metrics distinguish between "confident but fragile" behavior and uncertainty-aware forecasting.