ChatGPT has taken the world by storm with its ability to answer questions and hold human-like conversations. The state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI uses advanced machine learning techniques to generate human-like responses to a wide range of inputs.
We asked ChatGPT to create a portfolio of stocks from high-quality businesses with criteria taken from the leading 10 funds it is competing against. These include things like low levels of debt, sustained growth in the past and assets that generate an advantage of competitors.
Given these inputs, the programme suggested the 38 stocks in the table below. We assigned each stock equal weighting for the purpose of this experiment.
A fund is a type of investment vehicle that pools together money from multiple investors and uses it to invest in a diverse range of assets, such as stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments. This diversification helps to spread risk and can provide more stable returns than investing in individual assets. Funds are typically managed by professional fund managers, who make investment decisions on behalf of the investors in the fund.
To ensure that our comparison was based on funds with a wide reach and impact, we specifically selected the 10 most popular funds in the UK from Interactive Investor. By using these funds as a benchmark, we aim to provide a meaningful comparison that reflects the performance of the wider market. The popularity of these funds also indicates that they are well-regarded and trusted by a broad range of investors, making them a reliable reference point for evaluating the performance of the ChatGPT fund.
| Top 10 funds in the UK | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Fundsmith | Vanguard LifeStrategy 100% Equity A Acc | Vanguard LifeStrategy 60% Equity A Acc | Vanguard FTSE Dev Wld ex-UK Eq Idx £ Acc |
| Vanguard LifeStrategy 80% Equity A Acc | Vanguard U.S. Eq Idx £ Acc | Vanguard FTSE Glb All Cp Idx £ Acc | HSBC FTSE All-World Index C Acc |
| Fidelity Index UK P Acc | Fidelity Index World P Acc |
We carried out this conceptual experiment to illustrate the potential of AI in financial industries and investing, but you should not try to get stock tips from AI. ChatGPT is a language model that is only trained on data up to 2021 rather than current data, and it is not supposed to be able to give financial advice or recommendations.
In its current form, ChatGPT could be useful for retail investors if treated as a search engine that can analyse vast amounts of data. However, it should absolutely not be used for making real investment decisions and any financial answers should always be checked and verified. If you are unsure, always speak to a professional.
Less than 1 in 10 (8%) people already used ChatGPT for financial advice, according to our 2023 survey. This number might grow in the future, since around 1 in 5 (19%) people would consider using ChatGPT for financial advice. Nearly double that amount (35%) said they would not consider using ChatGPT for financial advice.
Perhaps most notably, around 38% of people do not know about ChatGPT. Around 30% of men and 45% of women do not know what ChatGPT is.
| Opinion | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Yes, I would consider using it for financial advice. | 18.50% |
| I already have used it for financial advice. | 8.10% |
| No, I wouldn't consider using it for financial advice | 35.40% |
| I don't know what ChatGPT is | 38.00% |
Analysts at finder.com asked Chat GPT to create a theoretical fund of over 30 stocks, based on a range of criteria selected from popular funds. The average performance of the 38 stocks it chose is being compared daily. The fictional fund is tracking stocks in dollars but, in order to ensure fairness, the performance of the fictional fund is then being converted to GBP so it is on the same scale as the real funds, which all report in GBP.
The UK’s 10 most popular funds were taken from the March 2023 version of this list of the most popular funds on Interactive Investor’s platform.
Finder commissioned Censuswide between 24.04 and 26.04 to carry out a nationally representative survey of adults aged 18+. A total of 2,000 people were questioned throughout Great Britain, with representative quotas for gender, age and region.
Matt Mckenna
UK Head of Communications
T: +44 20 8191 8806
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