A Wall Street Journal reporter handed ChatGPT $1,000,000.
The experiment ran for months…
She asked it to act as a fiduciary financial adviser… and fed it real market scenarios.
So the Iran war… a government shutdown… and ongoing back and forth on tariffs.
ChatGPT spat back asset allocation tables… and ticker symbols.
And at one point suggested she options to hedge… if downside protection is affordable.
So the model told an amateur investor with a $1 million to begin trading options based on a jobs report.
Without any context for if the options were cheap or expensive.
The reporter herself noticed that ChatGPT tended to tell her what she wanted to hear…
When she pushed it toward leveraged ETFs… ChatGPT warned her they were dangerous… but then walked her through exactly how to trade them anyway!
(No wonder it ended up underpeforming the market)
Now look… none of this is an argument against using AI at all.
I use it constantly.
It can summarise earnings reports in seconds and flag any significant changes.
That's genuinely useful…
But there's a canyon between a useful research assistant and a true decision maker.
That's the real lesson buried in this piece…
The tool isn't the problem… the question is what you're asking it to do.
What ChatGPT cannot do is identify your own risk tolerance…
It certainly can’t tell you that an 6% drop post earnings is just noise rather than a signal.
And as far as using it for anything options related… forget about it.
To be honest, none of the LLMs out there are much use for options. Even Perplexity, which has great stock information, falls well short.
So I ended up building my own AI tool specifically for options trading. And it’s night and day better than anything else on the market right now.
Oliver