The Canadian Investor - 6 Ways I Use AI for Investing

Episode Date: September 1, 2025

In this solo episode, Simon dives into how he uses AI, particularly large language models like ChatGPT as a tool to become a more efficient investor. From idea generation and researching new concepts to validating metrics, spotting historical patterns, and even playing devil’s advocate on stock ideas, Simon shares practical ways AI can save time while highlighting the caveats and pitfalls investors need to watch out for. He also explores how hedge funds are adopting AI today, from market prediction and portfolio optimization to compliance and operations. Check out our portfolio by going to Jointci.com Our Website Our New Youtube Channel! Canadian Investor Podcast Network Twitter: @cdn_investing Simon’s twitter: @Fiat_Iceberg Braden’s twitter: @BradoCapital Dan’s Twitter: @stocktrades_ca Want to learn more about Real Estate Investing? Check out the Canadian Real Estate Investor Podcast! Apple Podcast - The Canadian Real Estate Investor  Spotify - The Canadian Real Estate Investor  Web player - The Canadian Real Estate Investor Asset Allocation ETFs | BMO Global Asset Management Sign up for Fiscal.ai for free to get easy access to global stock coverage and powerful AI investing tools. Register for EQ Bank, the seamless digital banking experience with better rates and no nonsense.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Investing is simple, but don't confuse that with thinking it's easy. A stock is not just a ticker. At the end of the day, you have to remember that it's a business. Just my reminder to people who own cyclicals. Don't be surprised when there's a cycle. If there's uncertainty in the markets, there's going to be some great opportunities for investors. This has to be one of the biggest quarters I've seen from this company in quite some time. Welcome to the Canadian Investor podcast. My name is Simon Berger.

I am here for a solo episode today. I know I don't do a lot of these, but that's a bit of an exception because we are trying to get some additional content recorded in advance. We would like to take a few weeks off from recording at the end of August. So I'm recording this on August 7.

I'm doing a solo episode because it was just easier to do for timing, for scheduling, in terms of recording. The topic today that I'll be talking about is how I use AI for investing. And I will be mainly focusing on large language models like a Chad GPT. There are some alternatives out there. The free version is accessible pretty much to everyone.

You can also pay for it for more capabilities. But I think it's going to be very useful, especially if you're listening to this. You're probably a self-directed investor, although I know there's other people that listen to the podcast as well, but it can really help you be more efficient when investing. And there are some caveats. I'll be talking about plenty of caveats along the way. So keep that in mind. It's not a perfect tool to use that, but it can really help you speed up and be more efficient, especially if you have a busy life like I do with a podcast, with my family, and just trying to balance everything. It would be foolish for me to not.

not make use of these tools. Now, this episode was inspired by a Joint TCI subscriber. If you're not subscribing yet, that's all right. We love having you as a listener, but if you're interested, join TCI.com, the pricing will be $9 per month for another probably two weeks. By the time you hear this, early September will be increasing the pricing, but those who register now before the increase in pricing, we'll keep that price, and it includes our portfolio updates every month, meme, Dan, and Braden. It also has the podcast feed that is ad-free, and we also posed a video, and once a month, mid-month, typically the 15th of the month, I also do a portfolio update for my parents' investment retirement portfolio. So the Joint TCI subscriber had mentioned something,

if I remember correctly, it was a couple months ago, and I don't have their name in front of me, so I do apologize for that, but it was about how hedge funds use AI for investing. So I will do a segment on that at the end, but I'll start off with how I use AI for investing. The first thing is it's a great tool to find idea. So idea, generation, whatever you want to call it. I'm sure most of you listening have used screeners in the past to find stock ideas. I mean, fiscal.a.ai has great ones. You can find some really good screeners.

You can even ask it, like a Chad GPD, for example, to do a screener for you based on certain things. I don't know to the extent of the accuracy that I will provide, but that's something that you'll always have to be careful when it comes with AI. When I mentioned AI here, just take it as a way that I'm referring to something like chat GPT so I'll just use AI a whole lot unless I specify otherwise and for idea generation I think it's great because oftentimes using screeners has its limitation because yeah a lot of screeners you'll be able to filter by country market cap sector and things like that but if you're looking really for big trends for companies that are following these big trends or way to play these

large trends, so it might not always be companies. Sometimes it might be certain commodities that may be, may see a large increase in demand, for example, for electrification and things like that. It's a really good tool for that. So it's a great way to get some ideas, some companies that may never have come up on your radar and using AI to do that. You can also use it to find ETF, certain types of ETFs that you'd be looking for. But again, and this is something I'll repeat time and time again, it would just be a starting point. So yes, you may find a company because you're looking at a specific trend, but you'll still need to do the digging and due diligence, looking at the financial statement, going on at fiscal.a, looking at the investor relation,

doing your research. You have to be careful and you have to validate a lot of the time, the information it does provide you. That's why I think finding ideas, it's a great starting point for that, because you don't necessarily need to do a whole lot of validation if you're you're just finding ideas because you should be doing some more research. You're just, that's a starting point. Same goes for ETFs. If it provides ideas for ETFs, even if you ask it to provide the expense ratio and other things and an overview of what the ATF is, I think you should always look at the fun facts or the

ATF perspective from the ETF provider to actually see what it's all about. So yes, finding ideas, I think it's a great starting point. podcast perspective sometimes is just finding topic ideas and then you use AI to find those topic ideas and then you'll kind of do some more research on your own. Sometimes you'll use a little bit of AI but what I always do and that will be a recurring theme is when it gives you information always check the sources and I would say on top of that outside of the model that you're using, find some more resources, some sources, because it's important to validate because I've seen it time and time again and I've heard people that use it thinking verbatim that everything

it spits out is gospel for a lack of better word or 100% accurate. It is not true. I have given it so many times where I will, for example, we did a segment on poker and sometimes I'm just curious to say, okay, I'll, I'll give it a hand to review and it doesn't, I'll give it all the relevant information for the poker hand to review. And then when it answered me, I noticed that it just disregarded like a quarter of the information I gave it. I have to restate it and say, hey, I actually told you to do this. And then sometimes I actually take two to three times for it to actually listen to what I said and use the information. So I think it's, It's really important. It's a really good tool. It can be very efficient, can help you out.

Typically, I kind of use it more as a way that people may have used a research assistant in the past. So if you have a research assistant, a human, of course, may I specify, you would have always wanted to at least make sure that everything they provide is reliable, even if you really trusted them. I think you would at least make some spot checks from time to time. The second one is getting investing news. So for our news and earnings, that's really useful, but I like to stay on top of the news as well. So, for example, I might prompt it and ask something like, are there any authority investing news for Canadian investor from the last week?

Or maybe I want any updates on Canada-US trade negotiations just to get up to date, or maybe I'll want to know what's happening on the microfront in China, or maybe what the Bank of Japan did recently. But again, I have to stipulate here and mention that this is just also a starting point for the news. I may get a little bit of a recap, but I'll want to check those sources and I'll want to validate the information. Even the summary it could have provided me because I want to make sure it is accurate. And accuracy for me, it's very important. Clearly, for a lot of people that are using AI, they're not necessarily paying attention.

maybe they're just too lazy and they just don't want to do the extra work and they say oh you know what AI will do it and little anecdote on that which is not for investing but I had a friend who was doing interviews and they notice in the past year that when they get resumes they're heavily heavily done by AI and it just shows another way that people don't tweak it and take it as is that friend told me the number of resumes that it's so obvious that it's AI because for those that are not as used to using a chat GPT, for example, there's certain patterns that you'll notice if you ask it to, for example, like you draft an email, you ask it to review an email or something like that. It'll use dashes a lot and it will use emojis a lot and there's just a certain way.

and that friend of mine was telling me that there are some resumes that literally like it's full of dashes because Chad GPT likes to do that or there's a bunch of emojis on the resume so that's another example and if you're using Chad GPT for your resume it's fine to help you out but make sure you tweak it it's pretty obvious when it's not tweak and if I was someone interviewing for a position I was the interviewer if I would see that and look see that the person made no effort to actually tweak it I don't think I would even consider that person

but that's just a personal personal view here because it just shows that sure they're using the tool but they clearly don't know the limitation of the tool and how could I really trust their work if they're just taking everything as is from AI that is known to elucinate and provide wrong answers Want to buy a stock but don't want to shell out hundreds or even thousands for a single share? With QuestTrade's new fractional shares, you can invest any dollar amount and build a diversified portfolio instantly.

No delays, no trade fees, no excuses. Want to put $10 into a stock trading at $100? No problem. Quest Trade has you covered. They're the first broker in Canada to offer real-time commission-free trading for U.S. fractals. share in ETFs. It's simple, powerful, and finally available in Canada. Head to quest trade.com to open and fund an account. Use code TCI and you get $50 to get you started. In today's volatile markets, making smart investing decisions matters more than ever. That's

where the Globe and Mail comes in. From stock analysis and earnings report to tariffs and interest rates, the globe's business and investing news help you take action. With tools like CPP, RSP, TFSA, and mortgage calculators, the globe offers a full suite of resources to help you plan, invest, and stay on track, no matter where you are on your financial journey. Ready to invest in you, visit globeandmail.com slash subscribe for unrestricted access at a special introductory rate. The next one here, using AI to understand new types of investment concepts or financial metrics. So I've noticed with all the meetups, people, I have the sense that people think I know almost everything and I don't. I learned

a lot on my own when I started really getting into investing. And my personality is that when I don't understand something and I hear a concept or something I don't understand it, I have, it bugs me. I have to research it and understand it, whether I'm reading something, listening to another podcast and audiobook, if there's an acronym, for example, that I don't know, while using AI, it's a great way to just quickly know what that acronym or concept is. I think for the most part, it's pretty accurate when it comes to that. You're just looking for a general idea of what the concept is, right? So you're not necessarily double checking that or fact-checking the AI itself. You're just looking for a general idea. You always want to probably spot-check just

to make sure that it is accurate. One easy example is, for example, when we do news and earnings. So we'll talk about airlines and airlines is the one that comes to mind because I don't personally invest in airlines, but we'll talk about Air Canada. We'll talk about Delta Airlines for news and earnings, for example. And airlines have airline-specific metrics, and there's acronyms for those metrics. Because I don't look at them very often, maybe once every six months on average, I always forget what the specific acronyms are and AI is great for that. So I'll just plug in, I'll say,

oh, can you tell me what this metric means for airlines? And it's usually very, very good at giving me a quick response at what it means. And that's really good because in the past I would have used something like investopedia for terms that I wasn't used to for investing, for example, but it would take more time. So this is just an example where it just, it makes me more efficient. And that's something that you can use. Like anyone who does investing, I don't care how experienced you are. I mean, if you're learning new things, if you're reading different opinions, different assessments, different reviews, whatever it is, sooner or later you'll come across terms that you're not quite familiar. It could be even on earnings calls. Sometimes companies will have their own like special

metric and it could be something like company x keeps mentioning like this acronym a bcd on their earnings call what does that mean and usually it's pretty good at finding out if you're like precise enough with a company and saying that they're mentioning it it'll be pretty good at telling you what the acronym is so that is the second believe second way uh the third way sorry i use it the next one is comparing historical data so that's an amazing way to use AI for investing purposes. I like to use it to better understand how certain asset classes, for example, will have performed over certain periods of time, like a time period, which is doable without AI. Like you can find the data, you can

calculate the data yourself, but it'll take you time. And recently, I wanted to see how gold performed compared to other major asset classes during stock bear markets. So I asked, it to look the last 50 years. So it pulled up 1987, 2002, a 2000 to 2002, the dot-com bubble, the great financial crisis and

2022. And it gave me a breakdown of the performance for each asset classes. But again, I just double check. So that's another instance where you check the sources and you double check. In this case, it was just to get a

general idea. So I wasn't using this information for the podcast. so that was fine. I was just wanting to get a general idea. So when I would validate data when doing that, I would just make sure that it's not really out of whack noticeably. Maybe it was a little off, whatever. It doesn't matter. I just wanted to get a general sense. We'll go outperform U.S. equities, international equities, or has it outperform in past period. So that's how I would spot check it. Obviously, a lot of it when validating the information, you have to use. your judgment. So if you're just looking for a general idea, like I was just referencing here,

maybe doing some spot check makes more sense. But if you're looking to get some accurate data, accurate information, sure, use it as a starting point, but just make sure you validate that the information that it provided you is accurate because I just cannot emphasize that enough. Time and time again, I have seen it make mistakes. And they do put some disclaimers. And I, one of my friends told me that apparently Sam Altman had an interview any couple months ago and just saying that he was amazed how people, like, trusted the information without really validating it. So something to just keep in mind here. So the next way I use it is, it's funny, I titled this, Ask AI to Be My Devil's Advocate.

So I think this is probably, if there is one takeaway that you should take from this, this is probably this one. The reason why I'm saying that is, look, I think most people can probably agree that we live in a pretty polarized society right now. I'm not just talking about politically, although it's quite polarized when you're looking at it from a political lens, whether it's Canada, U.S. or elsewhere around the world. I think it's pretty hard to refute that right now. But also use it for getting the other side. of the coin for an investment that you might be bullish on, like a stock that you're super bullish on. Just use AI to give you a bear case or points where there could be a bearish case

to be made. Or if you're bearish on something, points where a bullish case could be made. I think it's really useful because a lot of what I've seen is a lot of investors tend to follow or listen to people that they actually agree with and that have similar minded philosophies, which is fine, but personally I think it's important to always have the other side of the coin and have a balance view. And I think it's great to use AI for that because I've definitely found that sometimes I'll ask it to give me the counter arguments for something, or the barrack's case or the bullish case, whatever it would be, whatever the situation is. And pretty often it'll say something, I'm like, oh, you know what? I actually hadn't thought about that. That's a really good point. And this is

really useful because a lot of the time is just, you know, giving you counter arguments and then you can do your own research to validate whether that makes sense or not. Maybe it does makes sense, but it's a like, low likelihood of happening. But nonetheless, I think it's a really good way to be able to be critical of your own ideas. And then you can make a really infirm decision whether it makes sense to, for example, invest in stock ABC or not. So that is one that, if there is one takeaway, I think it would probably that. And these, of course, are my personal, the way I use them, and of course, that one is probably more of my personal opinion, but I think it's really a good way to have the counter view on things. You can also seek other people that have different

views on social media, of course. You can do that as well, but I think it's a good way to seek a contrarian view to your own and trying to make as an objective decision as possible. the next two are kind of one big one so lump them in all in one so asset allocation idea and future predictions so AI can give you some ideas in terms of asset allocation for your portfolio maybe you you want to be 100% in equities and want some ideas on sector and geographical diversification maybe you want to have a balanced portfolio between stocks, bonds, gold, Bitcoin, real estate, and you want it to give you some allocation ideas based on that. You can also prompt it if gives you different outcomes for your portfolio, you can be more precise

because oftentimes you'll start a conversation and I know for me I'll notice that I'm like, oh, okay, I was probably not precise enough. So I'm going to go ahead and ask it to kind of tweak it a little bit. And I have an example here. So I am not 30 years old. This is just an example that I used to show, and I'm showing here for a joint TCI subscriber. So I asked it, can you provide an asset allocation template for my investment?

I'm 30 years old, and I don't expect to need the money until I'm 60. So it gave me equities. It gave me big buckets. So it gave me the equities, alternatives, and cash. And within these big buckets, it kind of broke it down. So it gave me equities 80 to 90% and broke down domestic U.S. international emerging market, gave me fixed income alternatives. And then it also gave me some ETF ideas to achieve the allocation. But then I was like, you know what, I'm actually looking for something a bit more on the conservative side and I do not

want to own any long duration bonds. So it said, okay, here's a revised. asset allocations. So equity is 60 to 65 percent and then a breakdown between Canadian U.S. international. Short-term duration, fixed income, 25 to 30 percent. Then a breakdown between short-term bond ETFs, U.T bills, high-interest savings account, a GIC ladder, and the percentage breakdown within that. And then alternative assets slash real assets, five to 10 percent between gold, Bitcoin, and Reitz. Notice I did not specify Bitcoin, so I just added that on its own, but maybe it's something that you're like, you know what, I just want gold, don't want Bitcoin, or I don't want gold, just want Bitcoin, or maybe you don't want that. So you can

really tweak it the way you want it, and then it will give you some ideas in terms of ticker examples in Canada. You could ask it for US, whatever it is. It's definitely a very interesting tool, you'll probably not come to the result you want right away. You may even just take nuggets of it. Like I've said before, when I'm reading, whether it's AI or contrarian views or someone that I necessarily don't, I generally don't agree with. Maybe it's someone that 90% of the stuff they say I don't really agree with, but the 10% is quite interesting. That's how I like to approach things. So even if you don't use everything, maybe it just gives you some ideas for your portfolio that otherwise you would not have thought about. So I think that

is a great tool for that. You can also use it in terms of just providing a template or saving strategies. There's some really good uses you can do there for investing. And again, this is invest. This is, this should be accessible to pretty much anyone who has an internet connection and a computer. So the, like Chad GPT, there's a free version. I think there is obviously some limitations, but you can probably get some decent value out of it. But the way I see it is it's really a good tool, see it as a tool, not for something that will do all the work for you, because if you start thinking it will do all the work for you, that's where you can get into trouble and getting information that's

just not accurate. But as a tool to being more efficient in your investing, in your research, I think it's a great tool for that. And I think that's how it should be viewed. So that's it for the segment on how I use AI for investing. And again, I use other AI tools as well. If people want to hear more about that in the future, I can do a more like deep dive episode on other types of tools that I use. But I wanted to do something that would be accessible for pretty much anyone listening. And there might be some people who say, oh, I huge a bunch of other stuff that's more advanced than what I just said. That's fine.

But I also know there's a lot of people that are still not using AI all that much, and maybe that's the little nudge that they needed to use it to help them be more efficient with their investing. The next segment here that I will be talking about is how hedge funds use AI. So that was the main inspiration for this episode. It's something that I had to do a bit of research.

I read a bit and then I came across this really good article from Risenands Capital and I'll put a link to the article in the show notes. It's a really interesting article. I would recommend that you read the article. I'm just summarizing a little bit here how edge funds use AI today, generative AI. And this is more than just Chad GPT. So it's pretty interesting what I found. So first, some ways that they are putting AI to work. Well, they're using it for their trading strategies. So they'll use AI to spot market patterns or simulate alternative scenarios using data. They'll try to use it.

They'll use it for market prediction. So some managers train language models on economic data and earnings call to identify patterns and generate trade ideas. They'll use it to optimize their process. portfolio. So position sizing, risk simulation, back testing, using alternative data. Notice how there are some things that I talked about in the first segment that they're actually using it for that. They'll use it to be more efficient with their operations, whether it's summarizing regulation, reaching out to investors, using it for letters, just save some time. it definitely frees up a lot of work from their analysts to focus on high value work versus

more administrative or lower value work. It's also very good for compliance monitoring because whenever you have these kind of funds or institutions, there's a lot of compliance involved and there's a lot of value for these funds to speed up that compliance part of their business, which can be. be having worked in pension funds. A compliance part can be really painful to do. So if you can speed out things, it's definitely not a bad thing. Want to buy a stock, but don't want to shell out hundreds or even thousands for a single share? With Questrade's new fractional shares, you can invest any dollar amount and build a diversified portfolio instantly. No delays,

no trade fees, no excuses. Want to put $10 into a stock trading at $100. No problem. Questrade has you covered. They're the first broker in Canada to offer real-time commission-free trading for U.S. fractional shares in ETFs. It's simple, powerful, and finally available in Canada. Head to questrade.com to open and fund an account. Use code TCI and you get $50 to get you started. In today's volatile markets, making smart investing decisions matters more than ever. That's where the Globe and Mail comes in. From stock analysis and earnings report to tariffs and interest rates, the globe's business and investing news help you take action. With tools like CPP, RSP, TFSA, and mortgage calculators, the globe offers a

full suite of resources to help you plan, invest, and stay on track no matter where you are on your financial journey. Ready to invest in you? Visit globeandmail.com slash subscribe for restricted access at a special introductory rate. So other benefits that they'll see using AI, better decision-making so they can quickly make decision based on not quite real-time but pretty close to real-time data that would normally take hours to do, communicate faster with investors.

Instead, like do it in minutes instead of hours. There's more oversights, whether it's monitoring internal discussions, emails, or hiring staff. Cost savings, obviously, I've talked about being research assistant. I think that's probably one of the jobs that will be eliminated the fastest by AI is you don't really need a research assistant anymore. You can just use AI models to do that research for you or at least get started. It is also very scalable, so you can cover more market if you're a hedge fund, and you can really expand your capabilities without expending your resources all that much.

And it really helps free up bandwidth for new ideas. Data said you can experiment with certain strategy and maybe get even strategies that they wouldn't have thought about using that. there are some red flags which kind of goes back to my first segment too is data quality so depending on what kind of data they're feeding their AI models it may be good or it may be providing good or bad if you're feeding it bad data then essentially garbage in garbage up right it will use that as training there's also a lack of transparency so sometimes you just can't explain why the model will do what it did even if you ask it to explain the reasoning. There can be some errors. So again, if things are not reviewed, especially when you have investors, you're sending an investor update and you used AI to do it and you didn't properly review it while there can be some risk to your reputation there. There are some security issues because if you put data on public AI tools that could be sensitive data, there's some major intellectual property risk that could be there. And the last one is probably being too

reliant on AI. Again, like I said early on, and it's funny because a lot of the issues here are very similar to what regular people will face when using AI is it can miss stuff. It can elucinate. And you can, if you use it too much as is and you don't do the check in balances, things that would normally be caught by humans, you can really get into trouble with that. So they have to really be careful. At the end of the day, the top firms, they're investing in data infrastructure.

They want clean, organized data. They want it as good as possible. They're building cross-functional teams, so they're building experts in AI, but also making sure that there's some real value to the hedge fund. They're also choosing the right technology because it's not necessarily one-size-fits-all. They're establishing a clear governance process, so clear rules around what data goes in, who uses the tools, and when humans should be reviewing the outputs. For example, if you're sending out a letter to investors, you want to make sure that it's reviewed by someone knowledgeable.

not a junior staff, for example, that would not be able to catch some of the errors that it would do. And I think the last thing that the best firms will do is just doing starting small. So doing some pilot programs and then you can build a momentum and go bigger as you know that you have proved that it's actually working well. So these are all, most of the things, like I said, there's are things that I research, but also there's the good article from Reason N's Capital that goes into much more detail. But it just shows that yes, AI is a tool that's being used by hedge funds

and sophisticated investors. And there's no reason why you shouldn't use it yourself to help be more efficient, like I mentioned, the first segment. But just like hedge funds, the same problems, be facing is making sure that you're getting quality information. And that's going to be a big challenge for AI, I think probably for the foreseeable future, because ever since Chad GPT has been out, there's been some hallucination, and it's still, still an issue now. So in, I guess to wrap things up, I would say, I think you, my personal view is investors should be using AI. It'll make them more

efficient, save a whole lot of time. But again, I think the emphasis here is that it is a tool. It's not, it should not be used as gospel. It should not be used as like 100% accurate because it is not. So use it as it is. Use it as a tool at your disposal that is extremely useful, but has its limitation, understand those. And I think it can really help you become a better investor because you'll be able to have just more information at your disposal without having to invest that much more time in it. So the value you're getting, the amount of additional or information at your disposal versus the amount of time that it's taking you to get that is actually some pretty good value when you do some research. So that will be it for the episode today. I hope you enjoyed this

solo episode. Starting to lose my voice, I can really tell that having a podcast with a co-host is much easier because you can take a little break in between segments. So we'll try to edit the audio a little bit because I had to take a little bit of pauses and drink some water a couple times along the podcast. So make sure it's a good flow. But I do hope you enjoy this episode. Like I've said, for other solo episode, please let me know if you enjoyed this. If usually I get pretty good feedback, so maybe I'll try to do one, maybe once a month or once every six weeks, something like that, a bit more often. It is fun to do. It's just a little different just to be talking, talking to myself or talking to you without Dan Braden or Dan Foch or one of our guests

to jump in and chime in when I'm talking. So I'll let you go. You probably heard enough of my voice today and we'll be having some more episodes. The Canadian Investor Podcast should not be as investment or financial advice. The host and guests featured may own securities or assets discussed on this podcast. Always do your own due diligence or consult with a financial professional before making any financial or investment decisions.