You are comparing to the almighty, not to the kind of financial advisor most people would find while looking at random. Between those with very high AUM fees, those selling bad vehicles that they get kickbacks for and such, people are basically getting robbed already.

It's not that one cannot get very specific, technical advice that helps, but someone without much financial literacy cannot tell someone doing honest work for a reasonable price from easy to find scammers with a marketing budget. The AI isn't going to get everything right, and it's not going to be easy to send good, proding questions to double check things without sufficient financial literacy, but that boring baseline is miles ahead of what most people get, as it's not trying to deceive you professionally, at least for now.

LLMs are mediocre for every topic that people talk about all the time.

When it's software development, it just happens that your mediocre code is incredibly bad. When it's financial advice or diet, it just happens that you mediocre advice is either the correct "do the hard thing, there is no magic" one or some crazy shit that will ruin your life.

> This is the common fallacy of “AI is terrible in my own field of which I have deep knowledge, but AI is totally fine in this other field of which I only have cursory knowledge.”

Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#%22Gell-Mann_...

Stock/bond ratios are way too advanced for what's qualifying as good advice here:

> AI consistently advised people to save during their working years, draw down savings in retirement, invest heavily in diversified stock funds, and reduce stock exposure after age 45.

This is analogous to saying to an aspiring software developer, "You should write clean and testable code, have clearly defined API boundaries, and a repeatable build process." All very true, but also so general and basic that it's not helpful.

Sound financial advice is not "go all in on SP500".

Albeit that's more sensible than what the overwhelming majority of retail investors do.

Sound financial advice takes into account the financial situation, time spans, goals, risk adversity, etc.

Models can be updated when foundations domain knowledge graphs are built on change. As of this comment, target date funds and pensions containing trillions of dollars adhere to the assumptions you mention (asset class allocation, growth rate and return assumptions, safe withdrawal rates ["Trinity study" aka ~4%/year], etc), and so consumers of AI provided guidance assuming these foundations could do much worse (as they already do today due to lack of information, knowledge, will, etc).

You literally just need to stick the Bogleheads forum into your AI assistant of choice for most folks, if they'll listen (which is the hardest part, imho, people want to gamble, not invest, in my experience). Prompt "What is your age?" respond "Optimal target date fund is 20XX fund based on your current age and retirement age, please confirm to set to default for investing." I suppose this will eventually make its way in some form into every banking, fintech, and brokerage mobile app chatbot in some capacity.

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_started

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card

If you want to get fancy, crib off of California's now mandatory high school financial literacy curriculum for grounding.

https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/personalfinance.asp

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

("computah, teach me how to personal finance and invest")

Investing and trading is a dynamic game. If everyone has the edge of certain portfolio to out perform the average, then no one has the edge.

Similarly AI is not going to solve that. Because everyone would end up with similar AI edge until no one has the edge.

People should start with simple universal rules: Stay invested. Buy low cost diversified etf fund. Favor long term investment instead of trading. Learn something from all weather portfolio composition to hedge the risks.

Yes it tends to be correct because the other option, invent a trading scheme, tends to work out worse for investors who attempt it.

That’s why that’s not the standard advice. It’s index stocks hedged with bonds. If you manage to buy at the “top” of your entire country’s economy, you’ve got bigger problems at that point.

IIRC, "Buy index funds. The end."

I look forward to more models like this but don't take this the wrong way, I'm not touching this with a 10 foot pole unless it's running locally on my private hardware.

Who are you selling the conversation logs and customer info to? If you’re not selling customer financial data (yet), how much are companies offering you for it?

I’d rather get no response than be patronized, so no linking to corporate policy documents on your website please.

> First, from a technical standpoint the required context window would be massive if you're looking at a person's career/life holistically. Probably solvable, but definitely something to be aware of.

Why would it be massive? The application layer typically compacts a profile of information about the users financial situation when offered. I doubt many of us have financial situations that would exceed the context window.

> Third, you would need a training dataset of all those input variables and their outcomes to be able to provide any sort of useful output. The first set of people to share everything wouldn't be able to derive any value from the tool, and I think you'd be hard pressed to convince enough people to do it to get a useful dataset.

Would you 'need' a training dataset of input variables and their outcomes for an LLM? Certainly for traditional ML, but the LLM toolcalling can simulate what an astute user should statistically do in their situation based on information on the internet and reason about the different constraints.

An advisor gives you emotional support and helps you not fuck it up.

It's more complicated than that. You probably don't want all your equity in stock, unless you're young and you're confident you can keep your strategy when the AI bubble crashes. And what do you do with the part that isn't in stock? bonds? what are they? which ones to buy? Even the 6-12 months of expenses in cash doesn't apply to all people.

That being said, I agree with the bad and expensive advisors, but I think financial planning is hard, and you really need to educate yourself.

I mean, never DCA anything that's terrible advice. But still better than what most people do.

If you’re a layman investor just dump all of your shit in index funds. Even if you’re smart and sophisticated, you’re still competing against the massive amount of fraudulent insider trading happening right now with zero enforcement and are trading at a disadvantage as a result

Which stocks to pick

The answer is almost always index funds

Yeah, Claude told me what a great idea converting my LLC to an S Corp would be and how much I would save in taxes. When I asked my accountant about he told me it would actually cost me more, because of NYC taxes S Corps.

I didn’t tell Claude I lived NYC, because it didn’t occur to me that it was relevant. I find tax stuff is full stuff like this (often more subtle than where you live).

I would suggest also simplefin. Only $15/year. Its a bit more simple/restrictive (e.g. they only allow like 25 api calls per day), but if you are just doing simple personal budget tracking they are more than enough.

Models aren’t trained as much from random internet text as they used to in pre-2024 era. Like they are, but specialized datasets get more attention.

> Never buy or sell an individual security.

This is controversial but very bad advice. No index funds, by their nature, will ever match the return of high-flying company stocks.

If you have very little investment capital available, then yes, allocate it all to index funds because you can't afford to narrow it down yet. But as soon as you have some room to invest in individual stocks, do it.

After about three decades investing, I can say that more than 95% of my returns are from just a small handful of individual stocks. The index funds are in the noise. More than 60% of my net worth is just from two stocks.

> 2. Buy inexpensive, well-diversified mutual funds such as Vanguard Target 20xx funds.

I wouldn't recommend this after seeing how SpaceX was literally shoved down lots of people's throats.

Elon told the economist in his interview last week that money won’t matter in 10 years. That is not financial advice. More people now “know” that than this list.

10. Teach the next generation to be responsible with money and their use thereof.

This means all this akward conversations about why I don't spend money on stuff that I don't need just because some YouTubers want me to.

1-7 lay the case for why a financial advisor is not required and not beneficial.

8 is simply a contradiction of the prior at best.

Sadly, also hyper-unrealistic. Very few people can afford to save 20% of their income whilst maxing pension contributions, let alone maximising other accounts.

Points 1, 3 and 5 are probably the key ones and would still stretch most people.

I never personally liked the blanket advice to "Max your 401k." For most, if achievable at all, that would be the most they can invest at all. Even though it is often recommended alongside a proper "emergency fund," that advice leaves little liquidity without major penalties.

> If you can even TRY to do these things it puts you SO far ahead of the average person.

This is basically the advice of this 2016 post (later book):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card

The basics are really basic/simple.

The writer of one punch man was on to something

> God I still remember when a friend showed up on his 18th birthday with a pack of cigarettes to show how “mature” he was. I always think about how much that one decision cost him over the years.

The irony of taxing vices. I imagine most of it's paid by people who didn't know better at a young age, and helps encourage the downward spiral of poverty.

And if you say it discourages young people from starting on the addiction, I think we're barking up the wrong tree. Disposable vapes have the highest amount of nicotine they can put in their nicotine salts. Nicotine pouches like zyns sell the most at 6mg and above. Dispensaries and street weed have enough THC that would put a hippie in the 70's in a psychotic break.

God bless that Gen Z doesn't drink or smoke cigarettes. But they vape nicotine and marijuana. Or use pouches / edibles.

If we don't prevent first time users from getting an intense nicotine head high or accustomed to weed 5 to 10 times stronger than what their parents were used to, then I really don't see the point of excise taxes. It should be about preventing first-time use, and giving off-ramps to these potent products.

You only ever hear about this stuff while it's up. The NFT bros have been quite for a long time now.

> I don't really see what AI has to add for the vast majority of the population

What it does best: sound plausible and never tire of a personal (sounding) conversation

An early study (with one of the early versions of ChatGPT) showed that people also come away less convicted about extreme political notions whereas chatting with a human had no or a slight solidifying effect. It's apparently an amazing tool to convince people of reasonable stuff (and probably also unreasonable stuff, if you'd make it, but I guess those proposals didn't pass the ethics committee!). There's loads of Financial cooks out there that'll convince you of golden mountains for anything that gives them a cut, kickback, or straight-out all of your money, so I could even see the reasoning in encouraging people to chat with just about any chatbot about their financial decisions

My main concern is the reliability: while it may be feel-good to say that it can prevent, say, 95% of scams and 80% of bad ideas, any time it fails at its job will actively steer someone towards ruining their life. Effort might be better spent on something that reliably works. So I'm not convinced either way yet, just that I could see how this is more convincing (and thus effective, at least in aggregate) than a napkin with legit useful commandments (at least for the USA; idk if we have such a thing as 402(K) here)

> I still get very anxious at the idea of people relying on llms though. It just works out more often than we think.

We should all be anxious about technology which is almost guaranteed to turn into metaphorical mind control. Some day these systems will be turned into highly personalized and effective brainwashing machines and topple our supposed democracies overnight. The more people trust them and rely on them, the easier it gets.

My kids have bank accounts to learn how to manage money, banks, and training: getting used to having money in the bank before, during, and after a trip to the mall. My hope is to let them screw up their finances when they’re little instead of 20-something.

We’ve also setup tax-deferred retirement investment accounts for them. $1 at 20 can 70x or more by retirement. Mostly it’s the mental training though. Being ok “losing” money during a market correction, saving for wealth in parallel with saving to buy, seeing interest and returns over time, and having a long term plan.

1.75 is less than the money is losing value from inflation. If that savings is in USD it's quite a bit less than inflation over the past five years.

You need to put them in a custodial brokerage account or whatever allows you to buy ETFs for them (not sure of best tax advantaged account for non-working kids) and buy the s&p or total us market. A bank account is horrible idea when they have a long time horizon meaning they aren't affected by ups and downs of market.

Bank accounts are for 6-8 months of salary for an emergency fund.

You can read this wiki or ask an AI about the strategy.

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page

Look into a 529 college savings plan.

VTSAX, ASAP.

Inflation is usually estimated at 3% + annually over a long enough time horizon. You're losing money.

> The seller explained us how a lease was so much better financially than outright buying.

Of course a lease is better than buying.. for the dealer. So the seller was honest, just not entirely transparent.

Leasing is one of the dumbest financial moves ever. Forces you into a perpetual treadmill of payments for life.

Just buy a car, pay it off (cash if you can, or with a loan) and then drive it forever.

Careful just recently two old guys in Chino Hills, California. Brothers 66 and 67 years old were involved in some sort of apartment deal for 20 million dollars which went south.

They were so extremely dissatisfied with something and went to the house of the financial advisor or grifter depending upon your point of view and took it took on him. What is going to start happening with AI data centers?

For a minute I thought your comment was a lead in to this south park skit: https://youtu.be/-DT7bX-B1Mg

Inflation will erode the value of money just sitting in an account.

Even if you lock it up and get better interest the results will get dwarfed by investing in broad, passive, and low fee funds.

If all you're doing with a bunch of cash over 18 years (!) is holding it in a bank account to collect interest, you're just losing money to inflation. Bank interest is almost nothing. Better to hold stocks, or at the very least bonds if you're extremely risk-averse.

Though this needs to be put in context - maybe you actually intend for the child to be permitted to spend the cash, in which case a bank account makes plenty of sense.

As the OP has "Aussie" in their name I think they'd be referring to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia Dollarmites accounts. They were shutdown recently after a watchdog investigation. It was locking kids into using the bank that would continue into adulthood and schools were getting paid to sign kids up.

https://www.morningstar.com.au/personal-finance/the-lessons-...

"They found that it provided little value for children and the largest outcome was that children were being exposed to ‘sophisticated’ marketing tactics."

The banks might pay 3% interest, whereas even non-volatile conservative investments like cap notes or bonds would pay something like 7%.

Plugging it into a calculator:

1.03 ^ 18 = 1.70

1.07 ^ 18 = 3.37

Example numbers, but you're effectively taking half of the money that your kid would have had on their 18th birthday, and giving it to a banker.

From a return on investment perspective, it is not great.

Bank accounts are convenient and safe, but you pay the price with low interest rates. But if you don't intend to touch that money for 18 years, you don't need the ability to withdraw at any time without losing money that a bank account offers, so why pay the price for it?

However, it has symbolic and educative value, teaches the value of saving, how interest works without going into the complexities of the financial system, and making it clear to your kids that it is their money, even if they can't touch it yet. So it may be a good thing for that reason, when the sums are reasonable.

You should invest in different things depending on your age.

An old person might want to have more of their money in yielding assets. They are withdrawing from the account so the certainty of having predictable value might outweigh the inflation risk.

Savings intended for a young child should be allocated almost entirely into equities. They are not affected by drawdowns since they won't be withdrawing from the account for a decade or two, but inflation is a primary concern.

A bank account is a particularly bad place to put savings intended for a child long-term. A good high yielding account might barely keep pace with inflation, but it's unlikely to grow much in real terms. The average bank account will lose money in real terms in that 10-20 years.

Bank account interest is pretty much always less than inflation. So, money sitting in a bank account for 18 years is just losing value.

Not OP, but I think they are referring to the fact that you can get tax advantaged accounts instead of a standard savings account. Not to mention the interest rate on those accounts is basically a rounding error.

The interest rate is very low.

My checking account isn’t the best out there at 1%. Same with my savings account at 3.4%.

Neither of those is anywhere near inflation. You are effectively losing money by parking it there.

Most checking accounts don’t pay interest at all. I looked up Bank of America's savings account: 0.04%.

You read that right. Effectively zero. And it’s a flat rate. Whether you have $10 or $10 million in there.

Inflation over a long time horizon is about 3%. Especially if it's going to be a decade or more, just put it in an index fund.

Are you referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

Those accounts should be in something that pays more interest because you give up the liquidity. You pay (in reduced interest rates) for the ability to withdraw at any time. You can instead be completely risk free and make more money* by promising not to need it for another 10, 14 or 18 years.

* However many of those methods involve locking in the interest rate, so you might miss out if banks start paying 10% like they did decades ago.

> set up bank accounts for our kids

yes

> so that they could accumulate interest over 18 years

at 1% ... no ... the value of that money will so eroded by 18 years of time - a better investment would be in some good memories with them; go to europe and see the Sistine Chapel or teach them to surf / play tennis.

Leaving money in the bank is not investing. Also, compare interest rate with inflation, you’re probably throwing away money every year. Meanwhile, your bank is actually investing your money and beating inflation. They pay you the interest and keep the rest.

> If you did your due diligence and you believe that this particular asset will grow within 5 years...

This assumes that most people know how to do "due diligence" and that their "predictions" are accurate. Most people don't actually have the knowledge and skill to evaluate the investment vehicles (stocks, bonds, etc.) available to them so their predictions are inherently limited and flawed.

> ... when it starts dipping after few months, and nothing major has changed in your predictions - you should buy more instead of selling.

One of the biggest mistakes average people make is selecting investments with risk profiles and durations that are mismatched to their needs and objectives. This is why, for most people, it's much better to use a properly-selected model portfolio than to try to pick individual stocks.

I've learned this applies to a lot of life. Being a good manager, tech lead, consultant, etc, advisor, parent, friend, etc, is sometimes just half being a good therapist and helping them regulate.

I've watched a lot of "not officially financial advice" finance videos on YouTube (the solid people, not grifters), and while the financial theory side is interesting, when they talk about pragmatic investing and patterns of client behavior they have dealt with professionally, a large part of it is emotion management. Convincing clients to stick with a solid plan even when this month is abnormally bad, or avoid going all-in on the latest hotness, etc.

That's because you get (particularly initially) quite some reduction of risk with little loss of expected return. Diversification (incl. across asset classes) is the only free lunch in finance.

If you want to argue that bonds and stocks have become more correlated, sure, but we do not know what hits us next.

I wasn't signed in. Do people not get better models when signing in? I imagine a lot of people have accounts.

Wasn't signed in.

I would argue coding is different from those other categories. I think you can ask AI expert level questions without being an expert in many fields if you are smart and well educated in general.

> I am lazy > directly hold options that construct the same amount of leverage

A lazy guy on hackernews, with knowledge on TQQQ, options.

You are making my case.

Holding TQQQ vs doing with options are different in many ways. You will get a tax drag that you need to be mindful of.

You are also not saying something that goes against what I said. The reason LLM says TQQQ is not a good long term hold is because it can go to zero or near zero due to leverage - which is "technically" true. You are saying something else.

I am also lazy.

The average index fund may not even be the best idea anymore - look at how most of the index providers except S&P caved on including an enormous but barely-tested IPO that has now dropped almost 20% since it launched barely 45 days ago.

You need to feed it high quality data. Try Gemini Notebook, but this time load up a spreadsheet of fundamentals information for all US stocks or ETFs. The answer will differ and be much more nuanced.

I dont think you can rely on an out of book chat agent today to have all the necessary information at its disposal - even if you can pull a stock quote in ChatGPT, it doesn't mean it's going to look at PE multiples on 5000 stocks...

Though almost a year old (may be too long in LLM age), just sharing a meta-article on LLM applications in different areas of finance.

Large Language Models in equity markets: applications, techniques, and insights, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, A. Jadhav and V. Mirza, 27 August 2025, DOI: 10.3389/frai.2025.1608365.

Personally, I am using LLM, mostly for analyzing and shortlisting companies for in-depth analysis, for investing in Japanese equity market for over a year with relatively decent results.