It might just be the most audacious bid on Wall Street to exploit newfangled AI tools to mimic the legends of finance.
Fintech startup Intelligent Alpha is launching a chatbot-powered ETF that promises to harness the brainpower of the investment world’s most illustrious minds — Warren Buffett, Stanley Druckenmiller, David Tepper, and more.
With the not-so-subtle moniker — the Intelligent Livermore ETF – the product is built around investment ideas generated by ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, dubbed the “investment committee,” that are set to be inspired by the thinkings and doings of the famed money managers. It starts trading on Wednesday.
The firm, with roots in engineering and emerging technologies, will instruct the large language models (LLMs) to emulate the investors’ personalities. The trio of chatbots will spit out 60 to 90 global firms that span a number of sectors, themes and geographies, including health care, renewables and Latin America, to name just a few.
The list of personas targeted by the ETF — besides Buffett, Druckenmiller and Tepper — will include Dan Loeb, Paul Singer and others, though the fund’s holdings may not necessarily reflect the real-life bets by those investors.
“If you think about the hedge-fund world today, that has pods that each focus on specific areas of expertise,” said Doug Clinton, Intelligent Alpha’s CEO and founder. “In a sense, we’re recreating the very basics of that structure where we have these different inspirations for investors we really respect.”
While the product’s ambitions stand out as particularly bold — even for the buzzy world of ETF investing — it’s Wall Street’s latest attempt to weaponize AI to create new riches for investors of all stripes. Some hedge funds already use chatbots for research and investing processes and say that AI can significantly cut down time spent on menial tasks.
The overall idea still remains largely experimental and untested. Little evidence exists that AI is disrupting and displacing investing units en masse, and much has yet to be resolved when it comes to issues like chatbots making things up in their answers.
Read the full article here by Vildana Hajric, Justina Lee of Bloomberg News, Advisor Perspectives