Just had an investment and retirement conversation with ChatGPT

I have a certain stack of investments it advised me to take positions on. I even told it the budget I was allocating and it broke it out for me on suggested amounts for each stock. Micron is my highest ROI at 256% but was over 300% at some point. AVGO is my lowest at 5% with the entire stack of companies sitting at an overall gain of about 50% YTD. And that’s after a pretty strong sell off the last couple months. These stocks were purchased the final week of 2025 to put that into perspective.

I’ve said it before, it’s a useful tool but the more specific you can be with your prompts the more optimal it will be. One thing it won’t prepare you for are unforeseen events with drastic implications. Not that anything can but what I mean is it won’t suggest to keep an eye on current events by itself. Not unless you ask it to consider the possibility of whatever event you can think of. And only then it might suggest a more cautious approach but that’s about it.

It’s been a good education tool for me. I maxed out my IRA contributions and basically started using it to teach me options and strategies that fit my risk tolerance and goals for my brokerage account. Beginners luck maybe, but my first option trade yielded me a 40% profit but admittedly I was impatient and sold too early. Coulda gotten closer to 100% or more but you can’t look at it that way.

I will continue to use it cautiously and as an added tool but I’ll never depend on it solely without other due diligence.

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it’s a useful tool but the more specific you can be with your prompts the more optimal it will be.

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Correct. My staff think of our AI (claude) as a way to clean up a question set and come to me with a more refined question or finished product. It has saved us significant amounts of time building out deliverables but the primary time saver have been filtering out questions that consume two or more staff members time.

In our use case, AI is no different than an abacus turning into a calculator turning into an excel spreadsheet. Has helped my staff become significantly more efficient.

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It really was remarkable.

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I've used Grok and ChatGPT recently to help with income management in retirement recently. I have pretty good grasp on the concepts and had done most of the research over the last couple of weeks, namely in where to hold certain investments/income products. While I was going through site after site researching ETFs etc, I thought let me try Grok. In less than two minutes it compiled all the info and suggested account/portfolio allocations. Was pretty eye opening how easy it was. I asked it to consider other nuances and boom it made some tweaks and offered alternatives that matched my risk profile/expense choices.

Yes. Welcome to AI. Want to bet against it?

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I connected Claude to my Monarch via the MCP Server (before it was paused a few weeks ago) and it was incredible

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This is the way.

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This would make me nervous (re stripping bare your financial accounts, transactions, amounts)?

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My thoughts too. I’d be afraid it would scour everything and find something to either blackmail me with or hold for ransom.

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Help me help me with understanding your confidence (vs my worry).

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With all of the personal information theft and corporate hacking that goes on, I just don't worry about this much anymore. I'd have 2FA on my financial institutions or anything that I was really worried about being secure, but otherwise technology is at some point going to beat your concern into submission either because the benefits are so great or there's nothing you could do about it anyway.

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My thoughts too. I’d be afraid it would scour everything and find something to either blackmail me with or hold for ransom.

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I used a generic question that did not include personal info. Like this "Construct a fixed income portfolio using an index approach that is a moderate risk." No personal info was exchanged. I could have asked an expert and spent time and money for their advice. Grok did it for free.

Grok started with explanations regarding credit risk, interest rate sensitivity, and diversification across treasuries, high-yield, etc. Then it gave me specific ETFs and allocation percentages for a well balanced portfolio that straddled expense, risk and return.

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This would make me nervous (re stripping bare your financial accounts, transactions, amounts)? Why are you not nervous about turning such private detail over to AI and its handlers?

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It's connected to monarch through either Plaid, MX, or just manual values I've entered (like property values). So no account numbers come through, just last 4 digits and whatever nickname you gave the account.

As far as personal financial information, I feel like it's almost impossible to hide at this point. Seeing what I buy, amounts, investments, etc doesn't really bother me. Either I feed it into this to help me manage it, or make it 100X harder on myself to do the same. I can see why someone would be hesitant though.

Our small group uses several of these and it provides tons of info. Fin Advisors will get wrecked in the future bc knowledge is becoming more available to the normal fellow.