Freetrade + ChatGPT

ChatGPT is way too unreliable to provide financial advice, especially from a regulated entity like a stockbroker.

Freetrade has avoided offering human advice due to the regulatory requirements, not a chance they’d offer it via AI that makes information up.

It will work, until it doesn’t, in the same way an expert stock picker picks great stocks, until they don’t.

It’s whether it can do it successfully, consistently over the long term.

1 Like

Yeah but the idea is not for it to pick stocks for you or to calculate financials but more to aggregate and summarize information on recent developments around your portfolio.

1 Like

Go to ChatGPT right now and insert the following text I provided below. It’s exactly 100 words, no hyphens no special characters, easily verifiable using many tools (such as https://wordcounter.net/). Now ask ChatGPT how many words are in the text. You will see it has widely different answers each time you ask and 90% are off by a vast margin (as much as 60%). Now think about what it means. LLM models such as GPT4 can’t actually do math, the way they sometimes seem to do math or analysis is deceiving, what they actually do is generate text that “fits right” (according to the statistical distribution of all text seen in training).

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam in finibus felis, sollicitudin vestibulum enim. Duis leo augue, dignissim id sem rhoncus, faucibus pretium sapien. Sed condimentum varius nibh. Fusce feugiat eros a sem ultricies hendrerit. Vivamus ac lectus vitae lorem molestie tincidunt. Integer convallis eget mauris non efficitur. Nam rhoncus fringilla ante. Donec a ex semper, consectetur nisl non, imperdiet odio. Curabitur tellus nibh, dictum nec tortor quis, tincidunt aliquam ligula. Vivamus quis dignissim orci. In cursus aliquet sodales. Donec bibendum erat ac malesuada lobortis. Donec sit amet finibus libero, sed posuere arcu. Quisque consequat urna at nisi placerat.

As an ML engineer, I can tell you that the idea of using language models (on their own) for any analysis/recommendation involving mathematics is a very very bad idea.

3 Likes

As I just mentioned before, the idea is not to calculate numbers. Instead, use it to aggregate & summarize articles/publications/sentiments for portfolio holdings.

Yes, that could be a potential use case. It’s not completely void of issues (similar to those in math/numerical analysis) though, but at least it’s much better.

That’s just a more eloquent way of saying what I said in the other AI thread :rofl:

The thing a lot of people don’t seem to realise is that these "AI"s are essentially a fancy pattern matching tool. They are not intelligent. they don’t have a model of the world in their “mind” like we do. the are basically predicting a reasonable string of words as a response to the input. The massive amount of data used to train the model means they can spit out something very convincing. but they are not thinking and are not in any way sentient.

1 Like

You’re missing the point of LLM models. It’s not whether they are sentient or not - it’s the size that matters.

In the end of the day, think it as an encoded database. It’s a huge knowledge graph. And that’s the benefit. It’s like going to a library, asking a question and getting the answer (most optimized for your question) without needing to search through books and summarize yourself. And because the size of information encoded, it can utilize connections to other topics or find patterns you might not have realised.

Now, I feel it’s extremely useful to aggregate and summarize business related news on portfolio firms.

Rather than run your investment decisions for you, I do think LLMs could help reinforce investor behaviour that results in better long term investing outcomes. Coach/encourage you to stick with the plan, don’t over trade, rebalance calmly etc.

There’s clearly also an opportunity to automate some customer service. Eg here’s Octopus energy:

“We started trialling [AI] with a handful of customer emails with a person supervising it [in] February. By the end of April, it was answering 34% of all customer queries. That’s the work of 250 people in the UK alone — and it is doing it with an 80% satisfaction rating. Humans get 65%.”

1 Like

Are they trained on Motley Fool articles?

1 Like

Yeah, that could be a problem. It might offer you a stock to buy, then harass you with hard-sell for much better investments that only a select few will have access to and only for a limited time - but that you can’t miss out on, because it will be much much better than the previous one they suggested. All of this would consume hours of time watching videos that say absolutely nothing except “give us your money”.

I would then unsubscribe and leave it as a lesson learnt!

Imagine AI hands with all those extra fingers, except replaced by AI Motley Fool emails and “exclusive member events” and endless ‘extra’ marketing!

I am imagining the pain - then the joy of pulling modules from Hal 9000 one by one to end the suffering for all of humanity.

2 Likes

I can’t understand FTs strategy here, as with many of their recent decisions. Are they experts at ML/AI development or integration? No. Is this what the community, users or investors have been clamouring for? No. Will it improve key metrics or business performance? No. Will it cause issues and additional workload? Yes. Is every other feature that could be expected of a broker available? No. Are basic features missing? Yes.

It feels like the crypto thing again. No real strategy, just doing something because it’s the hip new thing. There isn’t even a web version yet!

1 Like

I agree. It may just be that it would be a powerful marketing tool and very much topical from non-FT users perspectives.

It may be that integration would be a relatively simple process who’s marketing outcomes would outweigh the staff input. FT users have not asked for more advertising as far as I am aware - but it is still an important aspect of the business and brings benefits including increased users, income and therefore increased capacity to develop user-requested features.

Maybe @Freetrade_Team can offer their rationale on this decision?

1 Like

…It maybe that AI integration would be so powerful that if you put in “£10,000 profit in a month” it would generate it for you!

I would not complain about that!

To have winners you have to have losers.

So widespread publicly available AI investment advice cannot ‘print money’. And even if it did, it would be corrected by inflation.

If AI worked as an investment tool, which it might, then it’s services would be first employees by the highest bidder. These would be the hedge funds and the high frequency traders etc. This is where early gains could be made. Once it becomes ubiquitous then it will cease to function as differentiating tool
The customers of Freetrade would be at the back of the queue. Their lunch would have already been eaten.

1 Like

My bad - I meant it somewhat tongue in cheek, but failed to use an emoji :crazy_face:

I imagine that the true benefit would be in stock discovery through various metrics including financials and growth etc. as well as text interpretation around company management, business sector etc. If FT are aware, or suspect that competitors are investing in it’s use, it would be wise to keep on top of it.

I can imagine a tool which can pick a stock through filtering out CEOs with poor track records, looking for regularly increasing dividends, has a specific stock price in a particular market - and all through typing a sentence into a box.

2 Likes

Now this does make sense :rofl::+1:

1 Like