Write a prompt asking Claude to act like an investor who wants to know everything about a company. Upload the quarterly results of a business you follow. Click. Wait fifteen minutes. And there it is: an investment memo with a cash-flow model, scenario analysis, a risk overview and a valuation framework. Neatly structured.
“It’s insane,” a friend told me about the equity analyses produced by Claude, the chatbot from AI startup Anthropic. He runs a concentrated long/short portfolio at a large hedge fund in New York. He now analyzes three times as many companies as he did a year ago. His firm did not renew the contracts of several analysts. Claude can now do almost everything an asset manager does. Almost.
I installed the Claude extension in Excel myself. It really is remarkable. In minutes, Claude checks whether a stock’s price still makes sense and runs through multiple scenarios without breaking a sweat. The strongest Claude tool costs 2,400 dollars a year.
However, a portfolio manager I know at a Chicago mid-sized university endowment, who has shortened his workdays thanks to Claude in Excel, sees little reason for optimism among young bankers and investors. “The output isn’t flawless yet, but it’s often better than what an analyst produces after spending far more time on it. And every month the system improves.”
In his view, students graduating in finance and economics in the U.S. face the same reality as those who studied computer science and engineering. AI is already pushing many of them out of the labor market. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows they now rank amongst the five majors with the highest unemployment rates, alongside anthropologists and fine artists.
Former portfolio manager Stuart Kirk recently argued in his column that ChatGPT could serve as a portfolio manager. The investment strategy ChatGPT designed for him, Kirk wrote, was so well thought out that it made him genuinely worried about the future of investment gurus.
I understand the concern. At the same time, asset managers might view this development as the best outcome imaginable. ChatGPT handles strategic asset allocation. Claude takes care of valuations. Analysis becomes cheaper than ever.
What AI still cannot do is look a client in the eye when their portfolio suddenly drops 15 percent and explain, human to human, why that need not be a disaster. No algorithm senses when family turmoil puts assets at risk. Wealth management is not purely intellectual work. The hardest and most important part remains human. A computer cannot do that. Nor can it play a round of golf with your client. Thankfully.
Max Severijns is a journalist and lives in New York. He is a correspondent for Investment Officer. He studied communication and Japanese and earned his master’s degree in international relations at the University of Milan.