LLMs in Trading: What the Evidence Actually Supports

Language models are poor at the job they are advertised for and genuinely good at one nobody mentions: turning unstructured text into structured data at a scale that was never affordable. This path locates them against the trading stack, then confronts the defect that makes almost every published result hard to read, since a model trained on the backtest period may already know what happened and uses that knowledge even when told not to. It reads the leading study qualifier by qualifier, and ends with the engineering and governance that survive an audit.