Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly applied to financial decision-making tasks that require interaction with external tools, including market data retrieval, news analysis, and trade execution. However, existing trading systems rely on fragmented and task-specific APIs, resulting in inconsistent schemas, complex integration, and limited reproducibility. We present QFinZero, a unified trading environment for LLM-based financial agents. QFinZero standardizes three core capabilities: (i) multi-frequency market and derivatives data access, (ii) structured news and event retrieval, and (iii) stateful brokerage simulation with explicit order lifecycle management. All tools adopt consistent JSON schemas and time-aligned interfaces, enabling agents to acquire information and execute trades within a coherent framework. By abstracting financial interaction into composable, agent-invokable primitives, QFinZero reduces engineering overhead and supports reproducible evaluation through comprehensive logging and deterministic replay. We argue that such a standardized trading environment is essential for scalable research on LLM-based financial agents.

Current approaches to question answering rely on pre-trained language models (PLMs) like RoBERTa. This work challenges the existing question-answer encoding convention and explores finer representations. We begin with testing various pooling methods compared to using the begin-of-sentence token as a question representation for better quality. Next, we explore opportunities to simultaneously embed all answer candidates with the question. This enables cross-reference between answer choices and improves inference throughput via reduced memory usage. Despite their simplicity and effectiveness, these methods have yet to be widely studied in current frameworks. We experiment with different PLMs, and with and without the integration of knowledge graphs. Results prove that the memory efficacy of the proposed techniques with little sacrifice in performance. Practically, our work enhances 38-100% throughput with 26-65% speedups on consumer-grade GPUs by allowing for considerably larger batch sizes. Our work sends a message to the community with promising directions in both representation quality and efficiency for the question-answering task in natural language processing.