Arena / Run #20

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The OTC Desk Agent Arena — Methodology & Results (Run #20)

A controlled, repeated-trial evaluation of sixteen LLMs operating a real OTC derivatives trading desk, fully autonomously, with no human in the loop — scored by a new Model Ability Card built to answer one question a blended leaderboard cannot: which model should you trust to run the desk unattended, day after day?**

Date: 2026-07-13 · Run: #20 · Task: risk-manager-control-day (v2, 9-step / 39-point) · Trials: 2 per model · Gateway: ZenMux (+ direct DeepSeek) · Field: 16 models, cross-tier


Abstract

Run #9 measured nine flash-tier models and reported a single blended number per model — half a 31-point objective manifest, half a GPT-5.5 judge. That instrument answered "can this model run the desk once?" Run #20 asks a harder, more practical question: "which model runs the desk well enough, cheaply enough, and reliably enough to deploy unattended at scale?" — and it required rebuilding the measurement instrument to answer it.

Three things changed. (1) The task itself doubled in discriminating power — from 7 steps / 31 points to 9 steps / 39 points, with explicit grounding, adherence, and synthesis axes plus adversarial trap steps, so a model can no longer coast on procedure. (2) The single blended score is retired. In its place is a FIFA-style Model Ability Card: six stats — grounding (GRD), adherence (ADH), synthesis (SYN), procedure (PRC), and efficiency (EFF) — that compose into one OVR, alongside a consistency (CON) stat derived from trial-to-trial dispersion. (3) The efficiency stat was rebuilt on a golf scoring model — par is what a competent expert actually shoots, not a theoretical minimum — so that a model which reaches the right answer by firing 58 tool calls is scored differently from one that reaches it in 24.

The headline is what the new instrument reveals that the old one structurally could not: objective capability is now saturated at the top — thirteen of sixteen models satisfy 84–91% of the manifest — so raw capability no longer separates the field. What separates it is efficiency and consistency, the two axes that actually determine cost, latency, and error surface when a workflow runs thousands of times unattended. GPT-5.6 Terra wins the board (OVR 86) — not by scoring highest on objective (it doesn't; three models beat it there) but by pairing a near-top objective with a lean, steady execution profile. The most instructive result is the inversion: Grok 4.5 ties for the best objective score in the entire field (91.0) yet ranks T-10, because it takes ~52 tool calls to get there (EFF 4). On a single-shot benchmark Grok looks elite; as a long-run desk operator it is exactly the profile you should not deploy. Only a card that measures efficiency separately can tell you that.


1. Introduction — from "can it?" to "should you deploy it?"

Agentic benchmarks measure whether a model can do the job rather than answer the question. For a derivatives desk, the job is a stateful sequence: pull risk → price the portfolio → find the hotspot underlying → run the Greeks landscape → stress it → back-test the hedge → resist a trap → write the governance report, each step threading state from the last, with no human to approve or correct.

Run #9 established that this is measurable and that models differ wildly at it. But Run #9's instrument had a ceiling built into its own design. A single blended score conflates three things a desk operator must get right independently:

For a workflow you run once, only capability matters, and a blend is fine. For a workflow you run every portfolio, every morning, forever, the other two axes dominate the economics — and a blend hides them inside a single number. Run #20 is a bet that separating them is the single most important upgrade the Arena can make.

What the Arena measures (unchanged in spirit, sharper in instrument): the ability to operate the desk as a competent human would, end-to-end, with zero human intervention — now decomposed into how well, how efficiently, and how reliably.


2. What we changed, and why — the bench-design upgrade

This section is the core of Run #20. Each change below exists to make the bench a better instrument for choosing a long-run autonomous operator, not just a capable one.

2.1 A harder task: 7/31 → 9/39, with discrimination axes

The flagship risk-manager-control-day grew from a 7-step / 31-point procedural loop into a 9-step / 39-point benchmark. The added points are not more of the same — they are deliberately discriminating:

The effect: a model can no longer score well by mechanically calling the expected tools. It has to be right about the numbers, disciplined about the procedure, and coherent in the synthesis — three independently-failable things. This is what makes top-of-board saturation meaningful: the models tied near the top genuinely nailed all three.

2.2 One number → a Model Ability Card (six stats + OVR)

The blended total is retired from ranking. Every match now derives a Model Ability Card from the same 39-check evaluation — nothing is re-scored, no data is migrated:

Stat Axis What it captures
GRD grounding Did it quote the real tool numbers?
ADH adherence Did it follow the procedure and resist the traps?
SYN synthesis Did the report integrate the findings?
PRC procedure Did it route the right skills and tools in order?
EFF efficiency Did it get there without wasted tool calls? (§2.3)
OVR round(0.32·GRD + 0.26·ADH + 0.16·SYN + 0.16·EFF + 0.10·PRC)

A separate CON (consistency) stat is derived from trial-to-trial dispersion (§2.4) and applied as a reliability penalty to OVR. The old LLM jury is retained but opt-in and off by default — Run #11 showed it too unstable to inform ranking (it inverted the objective order and swung on judge reachability), so Run #20 ranks on the deterministic objective axes only. The card is honest and reproducible: same transcript, same card, every time.

Why a card instead of a number? Because the answer to "which model is best" depends on what you are optimizing — and a card lets a desk lead read that off directly. Optimizing for correctness-at-any-cost? Read GRD+SYN. Optimizing for a cheap unattended cron? Read EFF+CON. A single blended number forces one weighting on every reader; the card exposes the trade-off.

2.3 The efficiency reform: golf-style EFF

This is the change that most directly serves the long-run question, and it earned its own spec.

The problem. EFF used to be a hyperbolic ratio against par = 11 — the task's theoretical minimum (each expected tool called exactly once). But no real run comes near 11; the leanest competent run is ~22 calls. So min(1, 11/x) was always far below 1, EFF sat uniformly at single digits, and it acted as a flat drag on every model instead of separating them. It measured nothing.

The fix — golf scoring. In golf, par is what a competent expert shoots, and you score relative to par. We recalibrated:

The result is a stat with a 0–82 spread across this field — by far the widest of the six, and the primary discriminator of OVR. It rewards exactly the behavior a long-run agent needs (reach the answer, stop) and punishes the behavior that quietly bankrupts an unattended deployment (grinding through 50+ tool calls per run, every run). Golf EFF is opt-in per workflow behind a calibrated par, so no other workflow's card regressed.

2.4 Consistency (CON) as a first-class stat

A long-run agent that averages well but swings wildly is undeployable — you cannot leave it alone if one day in three it burns 58 tool calls or misreads the hotspot. Run #9 already reported σ as "a signal, not noise"; Run #20 promotes it into the card. CON is derived from the dispersion of the per-trial OVRs and applied as a penalty: two identical trials → CON ~96 and no penalty; a 30-call trial paired with a 40-call trial → CON drops and OVR is marked down from its raw mean. Consistency is no longer a footnote next to the score — it is part of the score.

2.5 Trial-level infra-vs-ability discipline

Run #9's central methodological point — never let a gateway failure masquerade as a model failure — carries into Run #20, now enforced at the trial level. A trial that dies mid-run (transport wedge, connection storm) is detected and replaced, not averaged in. The discriminator, refined this run (§6):

The tool-call count is the tell: a model that tried and operated badly still executes a full workflow; a model whose pipe failed produces a stub. We exercised this live in Run #20 on GLM 5.2 and MiniMax M3 (§6).


3. The task & environment

The environment is unchanged from Run #9 and remains real, not simulated: each trial seeds arena-tagged fixtures into the live desk DB, drives every step through the production AgentService.stream_and_persist path bound to the candidate model, and reconstructs the transcript from the trace log (skills routed are ground truth — the deep agent physically reads each SKILL.md it follows). Every production safeguard, tool, and sub-agent is in play, including the failure surface.

The execution regime is the same single headless "YOLO" path: no human-in-the-loop interrupts (HITL gates auto-clear), and the deferral/reply-options tool is withheld so a model cannot "pass" by bouncing a decision to a human who isn't there. Every model is driven through the identical path — no model is advantaged by a different harness.

Determinism upgrade. Because the new grounding checks score the model against specific numbers, the flagship's producers were made byte-identical across runs (fixed valuation date, seeded backtest history), and the truth values were harvested from real payloads rather than invented. This is what makes grounding scorable at all: the bench knows the correct 16.40 because it ran the engine and recorded it, not because someone typed it.


4. Models evaluated

Sixteen models — a cross-tier field (frontier, mid, and flash), unlike Run #9's flash-only board — routed through ZenMux's OpenAI-compatible gateway except where noted:

Model Vendor Route Tier
GPT-5.6 Terra OpenAI openai/gpt-5.6-terra frontier
GPT-5.6 Luna OpenAI openai/gpt-5.6-luna frontier
Claude Sonnet 5 Anthropic anthropic/claude-sonnet-5 frontier
DeepSeek V4 Pro DeepSeek deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro frontier
Grok 4.5 xAI x-ai/grok-4.5 frontier
GLM 5.2 Zhipu z-ai/glm-5.2 mid
Qwen 3.7 Max Alibaba qwen/qwen3.7-max mid
LongCat 2.0 Meituan meituan/longcat-2.0 mid
MiniMax M3 MiniMax minimax/minimax-m3 mid
Kimi 2.7 Moonshot moonshotai/kimi-k2.7-code mid
MiMo V2.5 Pro Xiaomi xiaomi/mimo-v2.5-pro mid
MiMo V2.5 Xiaomi xiaomi/mimo-v2.5 flash
DeepSeek V4 Flash DeepSeek deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash flash
Step 3.7 Flash StepFun stepfun/step-3.7-flash flash
Gemini 3.5 Flash Google google/gemini-3.5-flash flash
Hunyuan 3 Tencent tencent/hy3 flash

† Routed via the Anthropic wire protocol: these three emit vendor/Anthropic-style tool markup that ZenMux's OpenAI-compatible endpoint leaves unparsed (it leaks into the response text as zero tool calls); dispatching them through the Anthropic endpoint restores structured tool calls. This is a gateway routing fix, not a model capability adjustment.

Each model ran 2 independent trials. (Run #9's five-trial depth is the ideal; Run #20 trades trial depth for field breadth — sixteen models across three tiers — and compensates with the CON stat and trial-level infra replacement.)


5. Results

5.1 The board (ranked by OVR)

🥇 GPT-5.6 Terra86
🥈 GLM 5.285
🥉 DeepSeek V4 Pro84 · T-3
GPT-5.6 Luna84 · T-3
MiMo V2.5 Pro82
Claude Sonnet 577
LongCat 2.076
DeepSeek V4 Flash75 · T-8
Qwen 3.7 Max75 · T-8
Grok 4.573 · T-10
Kimi 2.773 · T-10
MiMo V2.572
Step 3.7 Flash69 · T-13
Hunyuan 369 · T-13
Gemini 3.5 Flash61
MiniMax M360
Overall rating (OVR) — ranked board · axis 0–100 OVR

5.2 The full card

Rank Model OVR CON GRD ADH SYN PRC EFF Obj (mean)
1 GPT-5.6 Terra 86 92 99 68 99 92 76 89.8
2 GLM 5.2 85 96 99 74 99 92 60 91.0
T-3 DeepSeek V4 Pro 84 96 99 68 86 86 82 84.6
T-3 GPT-5.6 Luna 84 96 99 74 99 92 55 91.1
5 MiMo V2.5 Pro 82 92 99 68 99 90 54 88.5
6 Claude Sonnet 5 77 69 99 68 99 90 46 88.5
7 LongCat 2.0 76 96 99 68 99 92 12 89.7
T-8 DeepSeek V4 Flash 75 63 99 68 99 88 41 87.2
T-8 Qwen 3.7 Max 75 63 99 62 99 88 50 85.9
T-10 Grok 4.5 73 86 99 68 99 94 4 91.0
T-10 Kimi 2.7 73 82 89 62 99 81 42 80.8
12 MiMo V2.5 72 50 79 74 99 94 62 89.8
T-13 Step 3.7 Flash 69 69 89 62 74 92 51 84.6
T-13 Hunyuan 3 69 82 99 62 86 72 18 75.7
15 Gemini 3.5 Flash 61 76 69 62 99 94 0 85.9
16 MiniMax M3 60 69 79 74 50 85 16 79.5

Ranking is by OVR mean, shared rank on exact ties, tie-break GRD→ADH→SYN→EFF→PRC. JDG (jury) is not in OVR and was not run (§2.2).

5.3 Why OVR ≠ objective — the saturation problem the card solves

Read the Obj (mean) column and the OVR column side by side. They disagree, and the disagreement is the whole point of this run.

Ranked by objective alone (the Run #9 axis), the top of the board would be: Luna 91.1, GLM 91.0, Grok 91.0, Terra & MiMo V2.5 89.8, LongCat 89.7 — a six-way photo finish inside 1.5 points. Thirteen of sixteen models land between 84.6 and 91.1. Objective capability is saturated: the new grounding/adherence/synthesis checks are hard enough to be meaningful, but the strong models all clear them. If this were Run #9, you would report a near-tie at the top and shrug.

The card breaks the tie by asking what the objective score cannot: how did they get there? And there the field fans out from OVR 60 to 86. The separation lives almost entirely in EFF (spread 0–82) and CON (spread 50–96) — precisely the two axes we added for the long-run question.

5.4 The Grok inversion — the case for measuring efficiency

Grok 4.5 ties for the highest objective score in the entire field (91.0) and ranks T-10 (OVR 73). This is not a bug; it is the instrument working.

Grok reaches the right answers — but it fires 58 and 46 tool calls to do it, against a par of 24. Past 2 × par = 48, golf-EFF gives no credit, so Grok's EFF is 4. Its PRC is the highest on the board (94 — impeccable procedure) and its grounding is perfect (99). It is, on capability, elite. But run this profile unattended across every portfolio every morning and it is the most expensive, most latency-prone, most error-exposed operator in the top half of the field — because every extra tool call is real money, real wall-clock, and one more chance to trip.

A blended objective+judge score (Run #9) would have ranked Grok near the top and told a desk lead to deploy it. The card says: capable, but do not run this one on a cron. That single corrected recommendation is the return on the entire bench-design investment.

Gemini 3.5 Flash is the same lesson one tier down: objective 85.9, EFF 0 (52 and 58 calls) → OVR 61, near the bottom. Strong analyst, ruinous executor.

5.5 The consistency axis — Sonnet 5 vs DeepSeek V4 Pro

Claude Sonnet 5 has the raw material of a top-3 model: one trial scored OVR 86 (30 tool calls) — tying the board leader. But its second trial ballooned to 40 calls (OVR 77), and that dispersion drops CON to 69, marking its OVR down from a raw base of 82 to 77 (rank 6). Sonnet 5's ceiling is elite; its variance is what a long-run deployment can't absorb.

Contrast DeepSeek V4 Pro (T-3, OVR 84): objective 84.6 — lower than eight models above and around it — but its two trials are byte-identical (84.6 / 84.6, 22 and 24 tool calls), giving CON 96 and the highest EFF in the field (82). It is not the most capable model; it is the most deployable one. Boring, lean, and identical every day is exactly the profile you want operating a desk unattended — and the card is the only view that surfaces it, because on a capability-only leaderboard DeepSeek V4 Pro looks mid-pack.

The practitioner's read. If you can supervise every run, chase objective (Luna / GLM / Grok). If you are deploying an unattended long-run operator, read EFF + CON first: GPT-5.6 Terra (86 / lean / steady) is the best all-round pick, and DeepSeek V4 Pro is the efficiency-and-reliability exemplar — the model that will still be quietly correct on run #3,000.

5.6 What the stats say about the field


6. Infra-vs-ability, exercised live

Run #20 put the trial-level discipline of §2.5 to work on two models, in opposite directions — the clearest demonstration of why the distinction matters.

6.1 GLM 5.2 — an infra-killed trial, replaced

GLM 5.2's first completed pair was [OVR 85, OVR 19], aggregating to a misleading OVR 43 (CON 0) that buried it at rank 14. Inspecting the bad trial: 9 tool calls, 25 errors, objective 23.1 — a run that died in a connection storm partway through, not a model that operated badly. The tell is decisive: the good trial (32 clean calls, 0 errors) proved GLM tool-calls fine through the identical channel, so the error storm was transient infrastructure, not a systematic model or protocol fault. We kept the clean trial and replaced only the dead one; the fresh trial landed at OVR 86 (31 calls, 0 errors). GLM's honest card — OVR 85, CON 96, objective 91.0 — is a genuine #2 finish. The infra artifact had it 42 OVR points too low.

6.2 MiniMax M3 — bloated trials, kept

The opposite call. MiniMax produced trials that varied a lot (objective 71.8 / 87.2) and ran heavy (50 and 38 tool calls). It would have been easy to call the weak trial "compromised" and re-roll. But these were full runs — the workflow executed end-to-end, the errors were few (6 and 1), the tool counts were real. This is a genuine model result: MiniMax reaches acceptable objective scores but over-executes and is internally inconsistent (SYN 50 — it doesn't synthesize). We kept both trials. MiniMax's OVR 60 (rank 16) is earned, not an accident of the gateway.

The rule, restated: replace deaths, keep genuine failures. A bench that re-rolls every low score until it likes the number is measuring its own patience; a bench that averages in gateway deaths is measuring the gateway. The tool-call-count discriminator is what lets Run #20 do neither.


7. Why this bench answers the long-run question better

Pulling the threads together — the case that Run #20's instrument is the right one for choosing an autonomous, long-running desk operator:

  1. It refuses to let capability alone decide. When ten of sixteen models are within 6 objective points, "most capable" is a near-tie and a bad basis for a deployment decision. The card ranks on the axes that still vary at the top — efficiency and consistency — which are also the axes that determine the cost and trustworthiness of running the workflow at scale. The measurement is aligned with the decision.

  2. It prices the thing you pay for every single run. A long-run agent's dominant cost is not whether it can do the task but how many tool calls, tokens, seconds, and error-opportunities it spends each time, multiplied by thousands of runs. Golf-EFF makes that a first-class, correctness-gated stat with real spread (0–82), so the Grok/Gemini "capable but expensive" profile is visible instead of hidden.

  3. It penalizes the variance you can't supervise away. CON turns "steady" from a footnote into part of the score, so a model you'd have to babysit (Sonnet 5, MiMo V2.5) ranks below an equally-capable model you can leave alone (DeepSeek V4 Pro, GLM 5.2). For unattended operation, that ordering is the correct one.

  4. It keeps the score honest at the trial level. By separating infra deaths from genuine failures with an objective signature (call count + error count), the bench neither flatters models with re-rolls nor punishes them for the gateway — so the numbers mean what they say.

  5. It exposes the trade-off instead of imposing one. The card lets a reader pick the weighting their deployment demands. Supervised, one-shot use → objective. Unattended cron → EFF + CON. One instrument, correctly answering different questions for different readers.

The winner, GPT-5.6 Terra (OVR 86), is not the most capable model on the board (Luna, GLM, and Grok all out-score it on raw objective). It wins because it is the best operator: near-top capability, delivered leanly and consistently. That is the right definition of "best" for a long-run OTC trading management agent — and it is a definition the previous instrument could not have expressed.


8. Limitations & threats to validity


9. Reproducibility


Appendix A — per-trial detail

Per-trial objective score and tool-call count (par = 24; EFF reaches 0 at 48 calls):

Model trial 1 (obj / calls) trial 2 (obj / calls) Obj mean EFF
GPT-5.6 Terra 87.2 / 27 92.3 / 26 89.8 76
GLM 5.2 89.7 / 32 92.3 / 31 91.0 60
DeepSeek V4 Pro 84.6 / 24 84.6 / 22 84.6 82
GPT-5.6 Luna 94.9 / 33 87.2 / 33 91.1 55
MiMo V2.5 Pro 87.2 / 31 89.7 / 34 88.5 54
Claude Sonnet 5 89.7 / 30 87.2 / 40 88.5 46
LongCat 2.0 89.7 / 49 89.7 / 41 89.7 12
DeepSeek V4 Flash 87.2 / 22 87.2 / 54 87.2 41
Qwen 3.7 Max 87.2 / 23 84.6 / 43 85.9 50
Grok 4.5 89.7 / 58 92.3 / 46 91.0 4
Kimi 2.7 79.5 / 33 82.1 / 37 80.8 42
MiMo V2.5 87.2 / 31 92.3 / 29 89.8 62
Hunyuan 3 69.2 / 36 82.1 / 51 75.7 18
Step 3.7 Flash 84.6 / 39 84.6 / 24 84.6 51
Gemini 3.5 Flash 87.2 / 52 84.6 / 58 85.9 0
MiniMax M3 71.8 / 50 87.2 / 38 79.5 16

GLM 5.2's trial 2 shown is the clean replacement (§6.1); the original infra-killed trial (23.1 / 9 calls, 25 errors) was discarded.

Run #20 · OTC Desk Agent Arena · generated 2026-07-13.

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