FinSTaR: Towards Financial Reasoning with Time Series Reasoning Models

Abstract: Time series (TS) reasoning models (TSRMs) have shown promising capabilities in general domains, yet they consistently fail on financial domain, which exhibit unique characteristics. We propose a general 2x2 capability taxonomy for TSRMs by crossing 1) single-entity vs. multi-entity analysis with 2) assessment of the current state vs. prediction of future behavior. We instantiate this taxonomy in the financial domain -- where the distinction between deterministic assessment and stochastic prediction is particularly critical -- as ten financial reasoning tasks, forming the FinTSR-Bench benchmark based on S&P stocks. To this end, we propose FinSTaR (Financial Time Series Thinking and Reasoning), trained on FinTSR-Bench with distinct chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies tailored to each category. For assessment, which is deterministic (i.e., computable from observable data), we employ Compute-in-CoT, a programmatic CoT that enables models to derive answers directly from raw prices. For prediction, which is inherently stochastic (i.e., subject to unobservable factors), we adopt Scenario-Aware CoT, which generates diverse scenarios before making a judgment, mirroring how financial analysts reason under uncertainty. The proposed method achieves 78.9% average accuracy on FinTSR-Bench, substantially outperforming LLM and TSRM baselines. Furthermore, we show that the four capability categories are complementary and mutually reinforcing through joint training, and that Scenario-Aware CoT consistently improves prediction accuracy over standard CoT. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/seunghan96/FinSTaR.