A Finder.com experiment using ChatGPT to pick 38 stocks finds the portfolio rose 4.9% compared to an average 0.8% loss for 10 popular funds over eight weeks
Theoretical fund of 38 stocks do better than 10 most popular funds on Interactive Investor, finds finder.com — Latest news on ETFs
Context & Ripple Effects
Finder.com ran a live-style experiment: ChatGPT picked 38 stocks, and that theoretical portfolio returned 4.9% over eight weeks against an average 0.8% loss across the 10 most popular funds on Interactive Investor. It lands amid a documented shift of retail investors toward AI tools for stock picking — usage that has already fueled a robo-advisory boom, per Reuters' look at ChatGPT-driven investing.
The framing matters as much as the result: benchmarking an LLM against a popularity-weighted fund basket extends a measurement tradition Robinhood institutionalized with its Investor Index tracking the 100 most popular app stocks. And adoption is not hypothetical — a Lloyds-commissioned study found more than half of UK adults now turn to generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT for financial advice FT.
First-order effects
- Finder.com gets a marketing asset and credibility with retail investors; the 10 popular Interactive Investor funds it used as the benchmark are now publicly framed as underperforming a free chatbot's picks.
- Retail investors who were already asking ChatGPT for picks get a concrete, quantified validation point — an eight-week record they can cite against traditional fund selection.
Second-order effects
- Fund platforms and robo-advisors face pressure to productize AI stock picking themselves rather than cede the narrative to comparison sites running experiments — consistent with the robo-advisory boom Reuters documented.
- Popularity-based benchmarks become a marketing battleground: just as Robinhood's index made retail conviction measurable, finder.com shows an AI-vs-popular-funds scoreboard that other publishers and platforms can replicate cheaply.
Third-order effects
- If LLM-generated portfolios keep being measured against conventional funds, financial advice bifurcates into regulated managed products versus unregulated chatbot guidance — raising the regulatory question experts flagged when warning investors against relying solely on AI.
- Because ChatGPT-era AI mania has already made the S&P 500 more concentrated around Big Tech, AI-picked portfolios that lean on the same mega-caps would amplify rather than diversify that top-heaviness — a systemic risk if the pattern holds.
The trend: Stock picking is migrating from professionally managed popular funds toward consumer-facing AI tools, with media experiments like finder.com's serving as the proof points that accelerate adoption.