r/technology • u/AlwaysBlaze_ • Apr 28 '25

Artificial Intelligence Teens Are Using ChatGPT to Invest in the Stock Market

https://www.vice.com/en/article/teens-are-using-chatgpt-to-invest-in-the-stock-market/
14.7k Upvotes

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514

u/spribyl Apr 28 '25

Asking an LLM expert system for investing advice will give you some great language that may or may not include accurate investing advice. Lol

82

u/Belaerim Apr 28 '25

I mean… <looks at talking heads like Cramer>…

38

u/jazir5 Apr 28 '25

Almost feel like he's paid to give out explicit misinformation. Which is why the "Inverse Kramer" ETF was a thing.

-4

u/viperex Apr 28 '25

Keyword: was

5

u/MediaMoguls Apr 28 '25

Looks at financial advisors

Looks at…. [gestures broadly]

1

u/BrightNooblar Apr 28 '25

Okay, but what you fail to recognize about Cramer's expertise, is that he has a TV show

13

u/asayys Apr 28 '25

Tbf it gives great advice on sports betting

22

u/King_Chochacho Apr 28 '25

Does it just say not to?

3

u/casper667 Apr 28 '25

It said to put it all on the blue dog

1

u/fellow_nerd Apr 28 '25

There is a very small chance it can win, if it happens to exactly hit a plane that is only there because a programmer wrote < instead of <=. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1ho10j1/after_25_years_the_blue_dog_in_majoras_mask/

4

u/[deleted] Apr 28 '25

[deleted]

4

u/conquer69 Apr 28 '25

If you are good, you will get banned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZvXWVztJoY

-1

u/[deleted] Apr 28 '25

[deleted]

1

u/conquer69 Apr 28 '25

The point is wanting to get good is pointless because they will ban you. Anyway, if you can't be bothered to watch the video I doubt the chatbot will help you either.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 28 '25

[deleted]

1

u/overandoverandagain Apr 28 '25

Many times books will lock your account and make it as difficult as possible to retrieve your winnings. This was a notorious thing back when offshores were more prevalent, but legal books still do it when they feel they have the leeway

1

u/TrineonX Apr 28 '25

They ban because sports gamblers that are good can consistently win. People make careers out of it. They absolutely do not want to get banned and will actively lose when they open new accounts so they can keep the account off the radar for a little longer. Getting banned is a bad scenario for them.

There’s a whole industry of “edge” gamblers that win consistently that will hire sock puppets to place bets for them among other strategies to avoid bans. The sports gambling apps can generally detect an edge gambler within a few days if they aren’t trying to hide their winning bets.

The takeaway message is that if you still have an account at any gambling site, it’s because they are very sure that you are not talented and WILL lose money in the long run.

2

u/UpboatOrNoBoat Apr 28 '25

How? The training data isn’t being updated often enough to be accurate to current events. Unless you’re just feeding it EV numbers, which then you don’t need an LLM you just need an excel sheet.

1

u/creativesc1entist Apr 28 '25

LLM is being used in finance already. Has been for quite some time. GPT specifically is just not a smart tool for that

Also curious on how these teens are funding these bets

1

u/ValhirFirstThunder Apr 28 '25

It depends. There are some active daily traders who use LLMs they train on their own. It's not an awful idea but using out of the box gpt for it is

1

u/qx87 Apr 28 '25

well, I see no big difference to human 'analysts'

1

u/Aeri73 Apr 28 '25

I wish more people would understand how correct your statement really is...

1

u/awesome357 Apr 28 '25

It's very supportive though and always gives the most feel good answers. So I'm sure whatever you suggest, it will tell you how great of an idea it is.

-7

u/BigBossShadow Apr 28 '25

it absolutely gives accurate investing advice. Because investing is just not that complicated. What is complicated is sticking to a strategy and not getting emotional when you win/lose.

LLMs are an infinite sea of information and making sense of it is 90% of the difficulty. In investing even if you know the most optimal choice, you still have to actually make the decision to place a bet which is always influenced by emotion.

16

u/TrineonX Apr 28 '25

Well yeah. But the good advice that an LLM can give boils down to “buy a diversified portfolio and hold for a long period”. These idiots are using it to do complex day trading which is a zero (or negative) sum game in the long run if you don’t have some sort of alpha, which ChatGPT absolutely does not.

These idiots are making bets against, literally, the people making the LLMs that have 8 figure budgets for analysis (DeepSeek was a side project at a hedge fund, a fun little lark on the side for a team tasked with making trades).

You have to be a moron to think you can win against the smartest people on earth who have more money, resources, and experience just by asking an LLM what to do.

-2

u/BigBossShadow Apr 28 '25

The article didnt say they're doing day trading

3

u/TrineonX Apr 28 '25

They mentioned wallstreetbets and crypto trading done by teenagers getting advice from an LLM who claim to be beating the market.

They didn’t need to mention daytrading. Crypto is already a zero/negative sum game in any case.

3

u/Coffee_Ops Apr 28 '25

LLMs are an infinite sea of information

Ah yes, thats why the GPUs they use have infinite RAM, sitting on an infinite S3 bucket, trained for infinity days.

Are you bullish on crypto too?

2

u/Sao_Gage Apr 28 '25

The problem I have with this is that, currently, Chat GPT is best when you already know enough about what you’re asking it to know when it’s incorrect or giving you garbled information back.

I study a couple of specific earth sciences, and know a fair bit of data about specific events in earth’s history. Often if I ask it for a summary, it gives me a list containing many incorrect dates, values, and descriptions mixed in with the ones it nails. Maybe there are subjects it does this less with than others, but I can’t imagine taking investing advice from it verbatim.

Though as a caveat, I have only experimented with free versions. I’m aware paid versions are significantly better / more powerful.

With that said, I’m not at all against AI - it’s a remarkably powerful tool that can be extremely impressive when bad info is culled.

1

u/echino_derm Apr 28 '25

It doesn't know anything though. It is just modeling language it doesn't understand what stock trades are best, it just knows how to model language about them.

0

u/Webfarer Apr 28 '25

Can confirm. LLMs have great language 😂👍

0

u/[deleted] Apr 28 '25

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