Analyzing a symbol Yahoo Finance does not recognize (e.g. XAUUSD+) could
produce an invented price instead of an error. The agent now either prices
the correct instrument or clearly reports that data is unavailable.
Ticker support:
- Commodities/forex/crypto resolve to the symbol Yahoo actually serves, so
you can enter the common form and it just works:
XAUUSD / XAUUSD+ / GOLD -> GC=F (gold)
USOIL -> CL=F (WTI crude)
EURUSD -> EURUSD=X
BTCUSD -> BTC-USD
SPX500 / NAS100 -> ^GSPC / ^NDX
Native Yahoo symbols (AAPL, GC=F, ^GSPC) keep working unchanged. New
instruments are added by extending the alias table.
Reliability:
- Unknown or delisted symbols now return a clear "data unavailable" result
the agent reports verbatim, instead of a value the model fills in.
- A failed fetch no longer leaves a broken symbol cached until the cache is
cleared by hand.
The ticker symbol reaches three filesystem-path construction sites
(load_ohlcv cache filename, checkpointer DB path, _log_state results
directory) without validation. A value containing path separators or
"../" escapes the configured cache / checkpoints / results directory.
Two attack vectors:
- Programmatic callers passing arbitrary ticker to propagate()
- Prompt injection via fetched news content steering the LLM into
tool calls with attacker-chosen ticker
Fix: new safe_ticker_component() validator in tradingagents/dataflows/
utils.py applied at all three sites. Allows the standard ticker
character set ([A-Za-z0-9._\-\^], up to 32 chars) and explicitly
rejects dot-only values like "." and ".." which would otherwise pass
the regex but traverse parent directories. Seven test cases cover
the accepted formats (BRK-B, 7203.T, ^GSPC, etc.) and the rejected
inputs (path separators, null bytes, whitespace, empty values,
overlong strings, dot-only values).
Closes#618.