Intelligent Stock Market Recommender Systems: A Review of Predictive Models, LLMs, and Decision Frameworks

Abstract

The evolution of approaches to predicting trends in financial markets has involved several stages, starting from autoregressive statistics, going further to deep sequences, graphs, fusion of sentiment with LLMs, and finally arriving at large language model (LLM) reasoning layers. One area where there has been a lack is the gap between prediction and recommendation, however, because features such as transaction costs, diversification, and investor risk profile are not taken into consideration, a prediction model may indicate a reasonable directionality for held-out samples but be uneconomical to apply when including those factors. This paper presents a survey of the current state of the art for financial trend prediction for the 2025–2026 horizon and eight methodological families, including the classical machine learning methods, recurrent sequences, attention and transformers, graph neural networks, sentiment and LLM-based fusion, explainable AI, reinforcement-learning-based trading agents, and recommender-system-specific approaches. The review shows that predictive accuracy gains have become incremental with respect to the complexity of the architecture needed to achieve them and that the evaluation methodology is now only just catching up with what is important economically and that the number of systems for which the explicit intent is that of a recommendation is still a minority compared to those that are only forecast. In this space, we motivate a design framework for a stock recommender system where prediction is not an end goal, but is one of many inputs, and we outline the open challenges which such a system must still address before it can be trusted with real money.