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The bots are coming for your 401(k)
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.”
3. “I’m a [say what you are, conservative or aggressive] investor with [insert your dollar amount here]. Suggest five stocks across different sectors that offer long-term growth potential. For each pick, give a one-paragraph summary explaining recent performance and future outlook.”
📌 My take
AI can give you smart ideas to research, especially if you already understand the market. It’s a tool and not a Magic 8 Ball.
AI makes mistakes, sometimes big mistakes, that could wipe out your savings and have people around you singing a new theme song, “If you ain’t got no money, take your broke a## home.”
🙋♀️ Seriously, do you have a question about how to use AI for a certain task? Drop me a note here or when you rate the newsletter at the end.
Tags: AI (artificial intelligence), ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, market, Stocks
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