Dr. Alejandro Lopez Lira has been trying to prompt AI chatbots to beat the market since 2023.
Lopez Lira, an associate professor of finance at the University of Florida, began his project early in the AI boom to see which model could trade stocks to deliver market-beating returns. After almost three years of testing the most popular models, he said he’s got his answer.
“DeepSeek is by far the best trader,” he told Business Insider.
DeepSeek’s portfolio is up 73% since it launched in 2023 and 35% year-to-date. ChatGPT has slightly outpaced DeepSeek since launch, up 78%, but is only up 16% year-to-date. The Grok portfolio has returned 54% since inception and 19% year-to-date.
He said DeepSeek is also beating Claude, though he noted that Anthropic’s chat bot hasn’t been managing a portfolio for as long as the others.
All of his AI-managed portfolios can be publicly viewed on Autopilot, an app that allows retail traders to copy moves made by successful investors, from Warren Buffett to Nancy Pelosi investors. Copy trading has become popular in recent years, and, according to Autopilot co-founder Chris Josephs, there has been increasing interest among users in copying trades made by AI-run stock portfolios.
“What’s fascinating is we see people apply and want to launch more and more funds, launch more and more portfolios, and more people are using AI to essentially prompt out their ideas,” he told Business Insider.
Lopez Lira said that while each AI model functions similarly in terms of information processing, he estimated that they only make the same calls about 50% of the time.
“There’s some setup involved in the sense that you have to add the latest information to the model — firm news, various fundamentals, things like that — but the final decision is the model’s completely.”
In a GPT portfolio white paper shared on his Autopilot page, Lopez Lira provided examples of some of the prompts he’s used in setting up the portfolio.
Dr. Alejandro Lopez-Lira/Autopilot
The platform also shows lists of recent trades each AI portfolio has made. Most recently, it shows 19 trades made by DeepSeek on July 14, including increasing its position in Nvidia and reducing its Vista Energy holdings.
While Micron Technology is the top holding for both DeepSeek and Grok’s portfolios, the second-highest performing portfolio, ChatGPT, favors Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, a lesser known aerospace recently named as a top pick by Stifel.
While the Claude portfolio also holds Kratos stock, its top holding is the iShares 0-3 Month Treasury Bond ETF, a stark contrast to the other bot’s preferences for Big Tech and energy stocks. It also maintains a fairly large position in Vista Energy, a contrarian position relative to DeepSeek’s move to reduce its position.
