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This paper investigates the vulnerabilities of LLM-based multi-agent trading systems to adversarial attacks that exploit inter-agent communication, focusing on how corrupted signals can propagate and lead to financial losses. By analyzing four distinct roles鈥擜nalyst, Researcher, Trader, and Risk Manager鈥攁nd evaluating various communication topologies, the authors reveal that no architecture is inherently robust against these threats. The study introduces the Adversarial Signal Preservation Score (APS) to assess the resilience of different designs, providing critical insights for enhancing the safety of trading systems.
No trading system architecture is inherently safe; adversarial signals can compromise decisions across all roles, revealing a critical vulnerability in multi-agent setups.
LLM-based multi-agent trading systems, in which specialized agents collaborate through structured communication to produce trading decisions, are moving rapidly from research prototypes to live deployments that control real assets. The same inter-agent communication that makes them effective also exposes them: a corrupted signal can propagate to the final decision and translate into realized financial loss. Unlike prior attacks that presume privileged access to system internals, we restrict the adversary to what is practically reachable---the source data and prompts agents consume---yielding a low-barrier, and thus democratized threat model instantiated as role-specific adversaries. We present the first systematic empirical study in the financial domain to characterize how an adversarial signal enters a multi-agent trading system and how far it survives toward the decision. Along the role axis, we decompose a widely-used trading pipeline into four functional roles---Analyst, Researcher, Trader, and Risk Manager---and pair each with an attack matched to its interface. Along the structural axis, we evaluate four communication topologies under data- and agent-level attacks, using the Adversarial Signal Preservation Score (APS) as a post-hoc lens on why some designs are more robust than others. We conduct experiments across five assets, two backbones, and two target directions. A central finding is that no architecture is inherently robust. These findings provide insights for the future design of safer and more robust agentic trading systems.
