54 Pages Posted: 21 May 2024 Date Written: May 20, 2024 Abstract We investigate whether an LLM can successfully perform financial statement analysis in a way similar to a professional human analyst. We provide standardized and anonymous financial statements to GPT4 and instruct the model to analyze them to determine the direction of future earnings. Even without any narrative or industry-specific information, the LLM outperforms financial analysts in its ability to predict earnings changes. The ...