Should you fire your financial advisor and use ChatGPT to make some of your investment decisions? TRICK QUESTION! If you even considered answering that, you are not ready to make grown-up money decisions.
Nevertheless, an experiment out of England suggests that the AI tool might have some use if you dabble in stock trading, at least for the purpose of doing research and picking out potential winners. As CNN Business reports, a test of ChatGPT to pick among some of the UK's top companies turned out to be more successful than 10 leading investment funds.
"Between March 6 and April 28, a dummy portfolio of 38 stocks gained 4.9 percent while 10 leading investment funds clocked an average loss of 0.8 percent," the site reports. The experiment was conducted by a site called Finder, a comparison site not unlike Wirecutter or Lifehacker.
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In its report, Finder says that it asked ChatCPT to pick stocks based on criteria including low levels of debt, sustained past growth, and assets that give them an advantage over competitors. The experiment was successful, at least in the short term, and did not take place during any major stock-market crashes or global disasters, so the results should probably be taken with some caution.
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According to a survey also conducted by Finder, only about 8 percent of ChatGPT users are asking it for financial advice, but 19 percent say they would consider doing that.
If you want to learn more about companies and gain insights into their financial potential, ChatGPT sounds like a good place to start. But, whatever you do, don't bet more than you can afford to lose on stocks (or cryptocurrency, for that matter). Protect your nest egg at all costs.