Large language models (LLMs) hold great promise for business applications, yet business analysis remains inherently complex, demanding rigorous reasoning and the integration of diverse knowledge sources. Existing benchmarks typically target narrow tasks and thus leave a fundamental question unanswered: how can LLMs be reliably applied in business, and how are these applications grounded in underlying theoretical capabilities? To address this gap, we introduce BizCompass, a benchmark explicitly designed to connect theoretical foundations with practical business knowledge and applications. At the knowledge level, BizCompass covers four core domains—finance, economics, statistics, and operations management. At the application level, it structures tasks around three representative roles: the analyst, the trader, and the consultant. This dual-axis design not only exposes performance differences across realistic scenarios but also diagnoses which foundational capabilities enable or constrain success. We systematically evaluate both open-source and commercial LLMs, revealing how theoretical knowledge translates into practical performance in business. The results provide actionable insights for model selection and training optimization in real-world business contexts. All datasets and evaluation code are publicly released to support reproducibility and future research: https://bizcompass.dev.ypemc.com.

Financial markets exhibit complex dynamics where localized events trigger ripple effects across entities. Previous event studies, constrained by static single-companies analyses and simplistic assumptions, fail to capture these ripple effects. While large language models (LLMs) offer emergent reasoning capabilities, their direct application falters due to structural market unawareness and limited capacity to analyze ripple effects. We propose FinRipple, an elegant framework that empowers LLMs with the ability to analyze ripple effects through financial theory-guided large-scale reinforcement learning. We begin by relaxing the assumptions of previous methods, incorporating a time-varying knowledge graph to accurately represent market structure. By seamlessly integrating classical asset pricing theory, we align the LLM with the market, enabling it to predict ripple effects. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to provide a standardized definition of ripple effect prediction, a task that is extremely important yet unexplored in the financial domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FinRipple provides a promising solution to this task.