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The paper introduces ValueAlpha, a pre-registered agreement-gated stress-test protocol, to validate LLM-judged investment rationale claims before returns are observable. By evaluating 1,100 investment trajectories with LLM judges, ValueAlpha identifies instabilities and biases, such as penalizing terse-correct rationales and failing to consistently assess constraint awareness. The study demonstrates that unvalidated LLM judges can reward superficial qualities over genuine financial judgment, highlighting the need for pre-calibration metrology in AI-finance evaluation.
LLM-judged investment rationales reward verbosity and confidence over actual financial insight, penalizing concise, correct reasoning by nearly 3 points.
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 \textbf{ValueAlpha}, 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 \(\bar{\kappa}_w = 0.7168\) but prevents several overclaims. Lower-rank systems collapse into a tie-class, one rubric dimension fails the per-dimension gate (\texttt{constraint\_awareness}, \(\bar{\kappa}_w = 0.2022\)), 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.
