The pursuit of alpha returns in finance has evolved from intuition-driven investing to autonomous, AI-powered systems.
A comprehensive five-stage taxonomy traces the progression across manual strategies, statistical models, classical machine learning, deep learning, and large language model (LLM) agents.
The shift towards context-aware financial agents capable of real-time reasoning, scenario simulation, and cross-modal decision making is highlighted.
Challenges in interpretability, data fragility, governance, and regulatory compliance are examined in this evolution of alpha in finance.