How to Use Chat GPT as Your Personal Finance Assistant
Introduction
It’s been largely impossible to navigate the internet over the past year or so without hearing about Chat GPT, the latest innovation by OpenAI. If you have somehow managed to avoid reading about it, you’ve most certainly consumed some content written by Chat GPT. A tool that has pretty much swallowed the entirety of human knowledge should be pretty useful right? In fact, there’s probably too much data on there which means you have to be careful in crafting the prompts you provide in order to get the results you’re looking for.
There are some great examples of people getting astounding results from the platform and these are largely down to how specific and well-thought out the prompts are. We love prompts.chat, an open source repository for very specific Chat GPT prompts, a couple of which branch into investing and personal finance.
Investing and Personal Finance Prompts
The thing about personal finance that makes this a useful application is that there isn’t really a secret sauce. Look, if you’re trying to become one of the most successful investors of all time, there’s no point asking the internet how to do it. But that’s not what most of us are trying to do. We want simple, easily digestible and applicable strategies that can expose our portfolios to a certain level of risk, in exchange for a solid return. For that, consulting a compendium that consists of pretty much the sum of human knowledge is a pretty good idea.
Things that Chat GPT (or indeed, its competitors) might be useful for are portfolio allocation strategies, the best percentage returns to use when forecasting, what traditional asset allocations look like and how the run-of-the-mill daily passive investor might be best starting off saving. For example, telling the model your savings rate, debt status, family or marital status and appetite for risk, and then asking it to spit out a portfolio allocation or a place to start putting excess income from tomorrow would be a solid application. So then, the key is to provide the model with adequate information. Which brings us onto our next point: the prompts.
Setting the scene
The real differentiator here is that successful prompts set the scene very well. They don’t just ask questions but specifically tell Chat GPT how to behave. For example, you might say: “I want you to act as an investment manager and come up with the most effective way to manage my finances. You’ll need to consider XYZ.” You can even upload simple datasets for the model to peruse in order to enrich the response.
Leaps of faith are not possible here, so you need to be abundantly clear about what your situation is. That means what salary you earn, what sort of savings and investments you have already, whether you have a family to support, how old you are (and hence your investing horizon) and more!
You might want to input your asset allocation - whether you prefer investing in stocks, real estate and bonds, or more aggressive investments like cryptocurrency and venture capital. You would then quite easily be able to ascertain what people in similar positions have done before you, and what sort of results they’ve experienced. Although the news and many influential investing voices would have you believe that we are in unprecedented times, it is far more likely that the cyclical nature of investing will continue long into the future.
Strabo AI
So with that, onto your Strabo dashboard. We know what you’re thinking. If you’re already signed up and using the platform, Strabo has your age, portfolio allocation, some of the investments you’ve chosen already, their performance to date, and a forecast of what they might be likely to return over the coming years. So why can’t you create prompts using that information? Well, it’s a question that we’ve also been asking ourselves.
That being said, we wouldn’t want to make a stab at a Strabo AI until we’re completely sure that it provides real value to users and augments the existing experience. It will likely start off as a plugin to your Net Worth forecast, which you’ll find on the main dashboard. For example, you might ask the model what the effect would be of taking a year out of work, getting married or making a particular financial decision. The model would then take these inputs and show you what the expected output might look like transposed onto your net worth forecast. You could then accept the change or try a few different settings and see how that altered the dashboard.
Sound useful? Get in touch using the question mark symbol in the bottom right of your dashboard and let us know your thoughts or what you’d like to see. In the meantime, we’ve included a few tips and resources to help you navigate through Chat GPT for your finances.
- Chat GPT can pick stocks better than your fund manager - CNN - a short guide from CNN on choosing the right inputs to get Chat GPT to spit out metrics and analysis on individual stocks
- Using AI for stock market analysis - similar but a more detailed Medium piece from Christian Martinez Finance
- Using Chat GPT for profitable investment advice - another guide, this time on a more macro basis comparing investing styles and how to implement particular strategies from history or from famous investors into your own portfolio decision making framework
Bonus tips: this open source project by @lencx is a desktop Chat GPT wrapper that allows you to run commands from your desktop and includes a whole bunch of useful extras. This Chat GPT prompt generator by Merve Noyan is also great - it allows users to generate prompts tailored to their desired persona.
