Not All News Is Equal: Topic- and Event-Conditional Sentiment from Finetuned LLMs for Aluminum Price Forecasting

Alvaro Paredes Amorin, Andre Python, Christoph Weisser


Abstract
By capturing the prevailing sentiment and market mood, textual data has become increasingly vital for forecasting commodity prices, particularly in metal markets. However, the effectiveness of lightweight, finetuned large language models (LLMs) in extracting predictive signals for aluminum prices—and the specific market conditions under which these signals are most informative—remains under-explored. This study generates monthly sentiment scores from English and Chinese news headlines (Reuters, Dow Jones Newswires, and China News Service) and integrates them with traditional tabular data, including base metal indices, exchange rates, inflation rates, and energy prices. We evaluate the predictive performance and economic utility of these models through long-short simulations on the Shanghai Metal Exchange from 2007 to 2024. Our results demonstrate that during periods of high volatility, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models incorporating sentiment data from a finetuned Qwen3 model (Sharpe ratio 1.04) significantly outperform baseline models using tabular data alone (Sharpe ratio 0.23). Subsequent analysis elucidates the nuanced roles of news sources, topics, and event types in aluminum price forecasting
Anthology ID:
2026.fnp-1.6
Volume:
The 7th Financial Narrative Processing Workshop
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Mo El-Haj, Antonio Moreno Sandoval, Ana Garcia-Serrano, Chung-Chi Chen, Paul Rayson, Yanco Amor Torterolo Orta, Paloma Martinez, Jordi Porta
Venues:
FNP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
59–77
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-fnp-06
DOI:
10.63317/59x9shp32g6h
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alvaro Paredes Amorin, Andre Python, and Christoph Weisser. 2026. Not All News Is Equal: Topic- and Event-Conditional Sentiment from Finetuned LLMs for Aluminum Price Forecasting. In The 7th Financial Narrative Processing Workshop, pages 59–77, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Not All News Is Equal: Topic- and Event-Conditional Sentiment from Finetuned LLMs for Aluminum Price Forecasting (Paredes Amorin et al., FNP 2026)
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