A finance professor tested AI vs. the pros. AI beat them. Also: an $8K Marketplace flip and how scammers stole $2M in gold with a phone call. And, get this, the FAA still runs on Windows 95 and floppy disks. Yikes.
The bots are coming for your 401(k)
ChatGPT
One question I get all the time is, “Kim, can AI help me pick stocks?”
Spoiler: Not only can it help, it might do a better job than a guy in a Patagonia vest yelling about yield curves.
A finance professor from Canada tested the stock-picking skills of ChatGPT, Elon Musk’s Grok and communist China’s DeepSeek. Each AI was fed the same market conditions and prompts and asked to build a stock portfolio.
Then he compared those AI-created portfolios to real-world funds managed by professionals. Yup, the ones who get paid big bucks to grow your money.
🏆 These AI tools didn’t just do OK
They beat the pros. And not just once. Over the course of several trials, AI regularly outperformed human-managed funds.
That doesn’t mean it’s time to fire your financial adviser, but it does mean we’re entering a new phase in how we invest. AI isn’t just for emails and generating recipes anymore. It’s parsing financial data, reading between the lines of earnings calls and spotting trends most people overlook.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, you could just as easily get bad advice, or worse, convince yourself it’s genius guidance because it came from a robot.
💬 3 smart prompts to try
Want to experiment with ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or another AI model?
1. “Act as a financial adviser for a [your age goes here]-year-old investor saving for retirement. Recommend a diversified stock portfolio with U.S. and international exposure, moderate risk tolerance and a 10-year horizon. Explain why each stock was selected using current market data.”
2. “You are a stock analyst. Compare the investment potential of [list the companies here] using the latest earnings reports, P/E ratios, market trends and analyst sentiment. Summarize the pros and cons of each.”
Chinese pump and dump stocks: Scammers are sliding into DMs and WhatsApp chats, posing as financial advisers. They’ll hype up shares in small Chinese companies listed on the Nasdaq that look promising. The twist? Insiders are manipulating the price. Once you buy in, they cash out, and you lose thousands (paywall link).
$2 loss
For every $1 put toward sports betting. As federal and state guidelines have loosened, fewer Americans are investing in stocks and other safer assets. This past January, folks put $14 billion into online sports betting — compare that to $1.1 billion in January 2019.
🔥 Nasdaq’s tech doubt: After an epic run, Goldman Sachs says the tech melt-up may be … uh, melting. Their traders flag a slowdown in “leadership” stocks like Netflix and Meta, plus some choppy “under the hood” signals like volatility sinking too low (yes, that’s apparently bad). Big winners are taking a breather, and the vibes are getting nervous.
📈 Teens are using ChatGPT for stocks: They’re running prompts to see where their money could land in a few years if they invest now. Take 15-year-old Ryan, up $6,000 after throwing his $800 paychecks into Bitcoin and MicroStrategy. Ambitious? Sure. Kids these days are skipping lawn mowing hustles and going straight to leveraged ETFs.
💸 Thinking about meme coins? The SEC says they don’t count as securities under U.S. law. Why? Securities (like stocks) usually offer profits or rights to a company’s assets. Meme coins? They don’t pay out earnings or give ownership. They’re more like collectibles with little real-world use. So don’t fall for them.