Generative AI and Large Language Models for Financial Markets: From Behavioral Prediction to Autonomous Trading
Financial markets are one of the few machine-learning settings where feedback is fast, mistakes are expensive, and deployment is constrained by execution and regulation. Yet most existing tutorials still treat finance either as an NLP benchmark or as a classical forecasting problem. This tutorial takes a different view. We show how recent progress in generative AI becomes genuinely useful in markets when it helps model participant behavior, ground reasoning in live documents and order-flow data, and support research and execution workflows that can survive contact with production. The material therefore moves in three steps: behavioral and market foundations; grounded LLM systems, including RAG, critique models, and agentic workflows; and responsible deployment, including corrected backtesting, execution, risk controls, and governance. Two live demonstrations and three optional Colab notebooks connect the lecture material to implementation.