Dr. Alejandro López Lira has been pushing for AI chatbots to win the market since 2023.
López Lira, an associate professor of finance at the University of Florida, started a project at the beginning of the AI boom to see which models could deliver market-beating returns on stock trading. After nearly three years of testing the most popular models, he said he had the answer.
“Deep Seek is by far the best trader,” he told Business Insider.
DeepSeek’s portfolio is up 73% since its launch in 2023 and 35% year-to-date. ChatGPT has slightly outpaced DeepSeek, increasing 78% since launch, but only 16% year-to-date. The Grok portfolio has returned 54% since inception and 19% year-to-date.
He said DeepSeek also outperforms Claude, but noted that Anthropic’s chatbot doesn’t manage portfolios as well as other chatbots.
All of his AI-managed portfolios are publicly available on Autopilot, an app that allows individual traders to mimic the moves of successful investors, from Warren Buffett to Nancy Pelosi. Copy trading has grown in popularity in recent years, with users increasingly interested in copy trading with AI-managed stock portfolios, according to Autopilot co-founder Chris Josephs.
“What’s interesting is that people are applying and they want to launch more funds, they want to launch more portfolios, and more and more people are basically using AI to derive their ideas,” he told Business Insider.
López Lira said he estimates that each AI model works similarly in terms of processing information, but only makes the same calls about 50% of the time.
“There is some configuration required in the sense that you need to add the latest information to the model, i.e. company news, various fundamentals, etc., but the final decision is completely up to the model.”
In the GPT Portfolio white paper shared on the Autopilot page, López Lira provided some examples of the prompts he used to set up the portfolio.
Dr. Alejandro López-Lilla/Autopilot
The platform also displays a list of recent trades made by each AI portfolio. Most recently, it shows 19 trades made by DeepSeek on July 14, including increasing its position in Nvidia and reducing its holdings in Vista Energy.
While Micron Technology is the top holding in both the DeepSeek and Grok portfolios, the second-best performing portfolio, ChatGPT, favors Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, a lesser-known aerospace company that was recently named a top Stifel candidate.
Claude also has Kratos stock in his portfolio, but his top holding is the iShares 0-3 Month Treasury Bond ETF, in stark contrast to other bots who favor Big Tech and energy stocks. The company also maintains a sizable position in Vista Energy, a position that is the opposite of what DeepSeek is trying to reduce.