QFRS: quantitative finance reporting standards for forecasting, evaluation and trading claims

Abstract

Financial time-series forecasting lies between AI and market microstructure, but most studies optimise generic error metrics instead of risk-adjusted economic value under realistic frictions. Unlike NLP and vision, the field lacks a shared, reviewer-enforced standard for data handling and evaluation, leading to persistent problems such as data leakage, backtest overfitting and metric-chasing on RMSE/MAE. This paper introduces QFRS a novel, enforceable by reviewers and editors, seven-standard framework and checklist for evaluating and reporting financial asset forecasting and trading claims. QFRS covers quantitative studies on equities (stocks), forex, cryptocurrencies, rates, derivatives (futures, forwards, options, swaps), energy prices, and commodities (gold, oil and silver) and other asset classes. The seven standards specify an end-to-end experimental pipeline, covering (i) dataset construction, (ii) labelling, (iii) point-in-time feature engineering, (iv) leakage-free scaling or normalisation, (v) time-respecting data splits, (vi) evaluation metrics and (vii) cost and slippage-aware backtesting with explicit execution assumptions and decision rules mapping predictions to positions. To validate the standard’s diagnostic value, a compliance audit of Scopus-indexed forex forecasting papers published in 2025 is presented. None of these papers achieved full compliance across all seven standards, with economic backtesting (12.2%) and causal scaling (31.7%) recorded the lowest pass rates. QFRS underpins a public state-of-the-art leaderboard, ensuring that only studies satisfying these standards are ranked, with the goal of shifting the literature from opaque, error-metric-driven results to transparent, economically meaningful and comparable benchmarks. The accompanying leaderboard is available and updated regularly at http://mkhushi.github.io .