New paper: an AI options trader made 18.3% in 6 months, until researchers let it read the news

Hi, I saw this on arXiv this week (lead author at Carnegie Mellon) and figured this sub would have opinions. They trained a 27B model to trade options on SPY and 9 big names like NVDA, TSLA and PLTR, the AI only picks the type of trade, like a long straddle, fixed rules pick the strikes, size it and delta hedge, the out-of-sample test ran March to August 2025, so it traded straight through the April tariff mess. They trained two versions from the same starting point. One could read news and SEC filings, while the other only saw market data like IV vs realized volatility, term structure, skew and option flow. ||No news|With news| |:-|:-|:-| |Return|\+18.3%|\-2.7%| |Max drawdown|\-9%|\-31.7%| |Win rate|29%|39%| |Avg win / avg loss|4.7|1.4| The win rate is what got me; the news version won more often and still lost money. The other one lost on about 70% of its trades and still made 18%, because its winners were almost 5x its losers. News did help earlier in the pipeline, when they used it to generate training examples from a bigger model. It only hurt once the model kept reading it while learning to trade for profit. I sell premium and ignore headlines, because by the time news hits my phone it's already in the IV. Full paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10407 Anyone here have a trade where the news gave you an edge the options weren't already pricing?