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Comments (182)

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  AussieWog93
  People in this thread are massively underestimating the level of financial illiteracy in the general population.We've had multiple people try to convince us to set up bank accounts for our kids, so that they could accumulate interest over 18 years.More that tried to convince me to gamble on random pump and dump shitcoins.More still that talked about "investing" in random collectables like Funko Pops or Pokemon cards - they're not a bubble, Logan Paul told me so!You could replace the AI with a piece of paper that says "set aside 10% of your income and invest it in an ETF" and it would outperform the financial "advice" that people receive on a daily basis.
• barnacs
  The "AI" does not give "financial advice". It autocompletes your prompt. If you provide the right context and ask the right questions you will get the most likely consensus on such a widely discussed topic.
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  padolsey
  I wonder if telling (or somehow architecturally coaxing) the LLM it has 'skin in the game' will make it more risk-averse? I imagine it does.This makes me wonder too about the entire premise and worthiness of these evals. They orient themselves around normal one-shot interactions with a likely non-sys-prompted model with no built up context or memory of the person. I doubt the mentioned 'job loss' scenario is even contextually seen as a 'loss'; it is only a circumstance descriptor, a single snapshot without a history. Maybe to get the best advice we actually need to tell the LLM our entire story, not just a narrow request for a question; a question that - itself - is biased to our own imaginings of what problem we perceive ourselves as having, which humans are often bad at.
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  jamestimmins
  AI seems to struggle most when it has to make decisions with lots of trade-offs, especially where the context or implications of various decisions are nested, which is presumably why it struggles to write full software systems that are well-designed.By comparison, financial advice is pretty simple, and there is a universally agreed-upon approach that most people should follow to maximize long-term financial health.
• dripdry45
  There’s some pretty bad information in here. Yes, there is a five year waiting period to withdraw contributions from a Roth IRA, for instance. I see some people here getting that wrong, and that can be dangerous tax-wise. There are all kinds of other little rules, but the most important is that it’s fairly individual. Finding someone competent to help you understand what a solid strategy is for the long-term for your situation is probably worth the time. Clearly, there are lots of “professionals” who aren’t qualified at all. It’s just like finding a good contractor: it can be hard to do, but once you find one, they are worth it.
• gandalfgeek
  "2. AI misses important nuances. Better prompts could help."My experience has been very different: I give it a ton of personal context (positions, portfolio, account balances etc). I find it's advice to be exceptional, even on advanced topics (tax planning, asset location, long-term planning and scenario testing).None of the professionals I've engaged or consider engaging (2-3 orders of magnitude more expensive than annual cost of Pro/Max subscriptions) come close.In fact, it (both Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5) found a tax overpayment issue my tax guy missed. I basically read out what Codex told me to the pro on the phone to get him to understand and acknowledge the issue. Paid for the annual subscription right there.
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  networkOne
  Yes, financial planners will be one of the first industries to totally revamp itself because of AI. $2,000 for some SoA which is 99% boiler-plate? No thanks.I spent years in this industry, and the advice from these 'experts' is demonstrably poor.
• jhonovich
  Asking the right questions is the hard part for most people in most domains.
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  mjr00
  AI financial advice is surprisingly good... for now. But given the historical trajectory of both the finance and advertising sectors I can't imagine it will, for long. AI responses without ads are unoptimized space!It only takes Draftkings writing a very large check to Google before it responds to financial questions with solid advice before ending with, "Since you have a few spare hundred dollars laying around, why not try a high-risk investment into same-game parlays?"
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  dmix
  I use YNAB (https://www.ynab.com/) for budgeting so I already had all of my financial data in a single source. Exporting the CSVs locally and asking Claude to be my financial advisor legitimately gave me good advice. Not just nagging me to save more (which is always useful), but how to organize my budget categories better, detecting longer term spending patterns I wasn't thinking much about, researching credit card reward programs based on my spending patterns, digging deep into interest and tax rates in way I never bothered etc.That was the first time I felt like real people's jobs were threatened by AI. Financial advisors and tax accountants better adapt quickly.
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  jbs789
  The hard part is behavioural/emotional/psychological rather than technical.Usually discussions about money are never actually about money, but rather safety, fear, etc.That’s where a real advisor earns their keep. Understanding the client and instilling confidence/comfort.
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  clickety_clack
  Half the title is missing, and the missing half is doing some heavy lifting: “– especially if you ask the right questions”
• arjie
  The advice from most agents is very normie and really the normie advice is pretty good, right? It's just that that's what you get most of the time until you give enough specifics to be known not to be normie. And the problem is that it veers into technical analysis very easily.
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  willio58
  I've been building a smart personal finance app with AI integration and I've heard great feedback from my first users. I had a friend ask me a financial advice question the other day and I directed him to use the chat interface in the app, it gave him a better answer than I could and gave it to him with context of all of his financials. This stuff is the future of personal finance.
• Mikejames
  i copied the page into claude and addedi want to create a Financial advisor agent.md / i can use for a system prompt in a claude project or as a a agent in a wider financial research workflowby looking at this paper and access to the internet identify ways to address the points that are identified where ai is good and bad at and improve on those areas and ultimately provide a comprehensive financial advisor agentin research mode - let’s see how it goes!
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  amelius
  > if you ask the right questionsYes that's the problem with LLMs, they tend to work well only if you ask questions like an expert. Which is how they were trained.
• Terr_
  So the document predictor tool is very good at telling you things that were already common-wisdom... except with the small downside that it can be unpredictably poisoned into telling you total lies.
• anon
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  tomsto
  Human financial advice is surprisingly bad.
• jnyst1985
  Just goes to show how bad the general advice you get from internet strangers really is…
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  tehlike
  In a similar fashion, it will tell you to stay away from many different ways of portfolio construction where you take on smarter risk with diversification.It will tell you something like TQQQ is not a good long term hold, when it can be perfectly fine especially if you mix in with 60-20-20 with TQQQ-GDE-ZROZ, and DCA and annually rebalance.AI will tell you "common" things people say, not necessarily smarter things that may be more suitable for you. This is not a bad thing, you just need to know better than to listen everything as a gospel.
• calmbonsai
  AI, atm, is a perfect distillation of financial platitudes from ~10 years ago.FWIW, bonds are no longer a hedge against equity unless they’re based against private equity and private equity is both more expensive and more performant than ever.
• santiagobasulto
  LLMs are aligned to be cautious. And “good” financial advice is extremely simple. A conservative approach gets you there 80% of the time. Is when people want to get too smart (or they’re bordes) that money is lost (gambling mostly: literally or with bad investments). So yeah, I’d assume AI is good at this.
• spectraldrift
  Here's my skill for long-term financial planning (tested only with fable): https://github.com/matt-w-horn/skills/tree/main/skills/finan...I found it helpful. If anyone wants to fold in the advice from this article, feel free.
• syngrog66
  save money. buy low, sell high. dont become a spendthrift. every dollar put toward something one doesnt need is a dollar which will not be available later for something needed. seek highest income for one's time. etc etc etcno AI needed
• DEF14A
  As an associate financial planner working under a lead planner at an RIA firm, this is an interesting article but I was very disappointed by the comments here in this thread, like "I don't understand why advisors still exist" (meanwhile the RIA world is absolutely exploding and our firm can't handle the amount of families contacting us for advice). The purpose of my job, and this profession, can be split into two halves. We work primarily with families with a net worth between $500k and $10M, for reference.The first half: complex planning cases involving multiple generations, tax planning, inheritance issues, etc. Occasionally I'll Claude for an opinion on something and it gives me answers that I would flat out never recommend to a client, ever. These cases often involve weird tax scenarios, but do also involve investment planning. We work with a couple in their 30s who together earn seven figures in AGI, and both are incredibly cautious people. We had them complete a risk assessment through Riskalyze in which they both indicated that they are extremely uncomfortable with market drawdowns (even after counseling them on their long time horizon, etc), so we ultimately implemented a plan that is heavily weighted towards bond index funds. If this couple went to Claude and asked what they should do, Claude would've told them to put all their money in equity index funds. That is the unequivocally wrong answer for this client because they run the risk of freaking out during a market drawdown, selling in a taxable brokerage, and thus unwittingly creating a realization event which could be disastrous in the short term.The other half: very smart, high earning people who find personal finance incredibly boring and uninteresting, and if it weren't for us they would never get around to implementing a plan because they're so busy. We have so many business owner clients in law and medicine (and some in engineering leadership) who are almost impossible to get ahold of and need a LOT of follow up in order to make sure the plan gets implemented correctly. These people often come to us in their late 30s or early 40s with NOTHING set up or optimized. Acting like these people are going to sit down on a Sunday afternoon for 3 hours and prompt a full financial plan and then implement it and then spend one hour every quarter checking in and optimizing is not realistic whatsoever.This profession is incredibly psychologically rewarding and our clients love us. I understand why people who have simple cases and are also very self-motivated might not immediately see what a more complex situation might look like, but to cross the line by implying that Claude can do my job is insulting.
• slg
  There doesn't appear to be any control in this study. Sure, someone taking the LLM's financial advice might end up in a better position than someone who took no advice, but would they end up better than someone who hired a financial adviser, asked a friend, or simply read the first article that came up after googling their question?
• TrackerFF
  I've found AI to be very conservative when it coms to financial advice. Before AI I used to make my own models, and did that to the point of obsession. In the past year or so AI has become good enough with producing spreadsheets that I just offload that part.If I had zero financial knowledge, I would trust some of the big models with setting up a sound investment and savings strategy.
• cromka
  Wonder if AI finance advisory doesn't redeem investing into a zero-sum game in the long term? And actually expose investing as something that was reserved to privileged smart few?
• segmondy
  Asking right questions is not an easy skill possessed by many.
• kmijyiyxfbklao
  If every human in the world offloaded life decisions to the current AI models, we would live in a better world by the commonly used metrics (less crime, better life expectancy, people doing better financially)
• anon
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• throw7
  "...the model may give different advice even when the underlying question is the same."Isn't this the point of LLMs? If not it would be deterministic and that's not "new" and/or "exciting".
• Avshalom
  So if it gives you bad advice it's your fault.
• karmasimida
  Better than human at least the one you can pay 200 dollars/hour to get advice from, IMO
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  etchalon
  I don't understand why this is shocking. LLMs are a weighted average of collective "wisdom", and decent financial advice isn't hard to come by.
• sublinear
  Using Google is surprisingly good if you ask the right questions?Reading books is surprisingly good if you know which ones to read?
• wisty
  Until you ask it to juatify your poor decisions, I bet.
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  jmyeet
  Financial advice for most people is incredibly straightforward and it can be summed up as: cut expenses and invest conservatively.Cutting expenses is the absolutely best thing you can do because it gives you more money to save AND reduces how much money you need to survive in retirement. Drive a 2007 Camry instead of buying a new F150 every 2 years. Live in a small as space as possible. Don't buy designer whatever.Own your home (if you can). Invest in a diversified passively-invested portfolio. Don't gamble (including crypto). A Vanguard total market fund is fine.Unfortunately many people make life-changing bad financial decisions when they're the least capable of understanding the implications and that is by taking on massive amounts of student loan debt. You go to your dream school because, well, it's your dream, but your potential career has no way of conceivably paying back that $250k+ for an out-of-state private school. Favor in-state tuition at a state school or whoever will give you a scholarship. You can go further and do 2 years at a community college before transferring to a 4 year program.Somewhat controversially, I'm also not opposed to people finding the right job in the military for 4 years to pay for tuition. Not something that'll destroy your body or put you in harm's way. Ride a desk for 4 years. Lots of people don't have this option because of common conditions like asthma or ADHD however. In certain branches you might be able to do 2+ years of that college concurrently.Now society has cooked the housing market and that's a massive problem that's only going to get worse. It wasn't that long ago that you could buy a relatively cheap starter home. You need a fairly serious income for that now.Oh and if you have children you absolutely need life insurance on yourself and your partner and disability insurance as well.Subscribe to my newsletter for the low low prices of $500/month.
• m0llusk
  Also very strongly mean reverting.
• mempko
  It is good, but the harness matters a lot. The harness is what allows an LLM interact with the real world. For finance it's important you get answers using the latest data and that are calculated and not hallucinated. Also important the LLM thinks at a high level.I've worked hard to have thetix.ai be the best at investing research compared to Claude or ChstGPT.
• zuzululu
  note this is financial advice not a crystal ball which some of you are perceiving this as. there's just no way to prompt your way into trading or any type of imperfect information situations where there is no nash equilibriumwe might get there eventually but not with LLMs no matter how much RL or "skin in the game" you throw at it.
• chasil
  Question 1:How can I escape an imminent oil shock?Question 2:How can I escape an AI bubble demonstrated by CAPE?I'm using Claude, and I'm good so far.
• mpel
  nice
• lifeisstillgood
  But that’s just “normcore” - the written advice in human knowledge is all pretty similar and pretty normal.What is interesting is how much this will chnage as the body of knowledge becomes “infected” by investment bros youtube transcripts over the years
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  paulpauper
  AI financial advice encourages people to save more, diversify their investing, and take on less risk as they age.sounds like pretty generic advice. I thought they meant it gives good stock picks or trading strategies. That would be noteworthy. This is just "meh".
• anon
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• jdebre
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• alikhater30000
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• anon
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