How Litquidity is using AI tools catered for finance professionals

Happy Sunday, everyone!

We’re back with another Deep Dive on the hot topic across most industries lately, artificial intelligence.

You’ve probably seen ChatGPT write market recaps, Perplexity fetch news faster than your Bloomberg alerts, and Synthesia... well, Synthesia is out there making eerily lifelike talking avatars (because apparently, deep fake corporate training videos were the missing piece of the puzzle). 

Every AI tool is trying to carve out its lane. Some are built for casual research and some are just really good at giving you confident wrong answers (we’ve all had those humble moments, tips on how to avoid that are further down in the deep dive). The same applies to finance professionals, with individuals / firms adjusting to the ever-changing technology landscape and layering AI-powered insights into their workflows to cut through the noise and save hours on time-intensive tasks.

As a Wharton School paper states, “The financial sector, traditionally a bastion of human expertise and intuition, is witnessing a paradigm shift. From algorithmic trading to personalized financial advice, the applications of generative AI in finance are as diverse as they are profound… The true power of AI to reshape the financial landscape is still unfolding.” 

The real question isn’t whether or not you should be using AI at work (you definitely should), it’s identifying which tool is built and optimized for your particular use cases to help make your life easier and your outputs more efficient / thorough. AI is everywhere, so it’s time to identify, learn, and master the tools that are right for you. 

AI is everywhere, but not all AI is the same

Everyone is beginning to chat about the new startups bursting into the scene. As Sarah Hammer from Wharton states,“the launch of large language models and ChatGPT in 2022 marked a watershed moment, not just for the world but particularly for financial services. These advancements have opened up new frontiers in data analysis, customer interaction, and decision-making processes. As we stand on this precipice of change, it’s clear that the financial landscape is being redrawn. New winners will emerge – those who can harness the power of AI to create value, innovate services, and navigate complex regulatory environments. Conversely, those who fail to adapt risk obsolescence in an increasingly AI-driven world.”

The smartest approach isn’t trying to find one tool to rule them all, but figuring out the right stack to get what you need, when you need it. 

Here are some examples of AI tools that are hot right now:

• ChatGPT & Claude: Solid for brainstorming, drafting, and general research. However, these solutions are not optimized for every industry vertical and often fall short of meeting the needs of professionals in niche industries.

• Perplexity: Good for quick fact-finding, but doesn’t prioritize financial-grade sourcing or structured analysis.

• Adept: Acts like an AI-powered assistant, helping automate workflows and navigate complex software.

• Bigdata.com: Pulls real-time market data, earnings transcripts, filings, analyst sentiment, and macro indicators, then ties it all together with citations from credible sources. It allows you to run workflows like earnings previews or sector summaries, or schedule daily briefs on your watchlist without the end user having to create prompts. 

• Narakeet: Creates AI voice overs, which comes in handy if your voice doesn’t fit the tone you’re going for or if your voice is raspy from a fever.

• Viggle: a powerful AI animation tool and image-to-video to generator (great for meme-generation btw)

• Sesame: creates voice-based AI assistants that can hold conversations / phone calls while sounding incredibly human-like (kinda creepy tbh but this could disrupt and greatly improve call centers)

The comprehensive list is seemingly endless. To highlight this, here’s a market map of the AI / ML landscape as of 2024:

The AI tool landscape has grown significantly and I can name off many more that I’ve found useful, but for now I’ll stick to what’s relevant for many of you: AI tools for finance professionals. (This has me thinking I should drop a comprehensive list of AI companies building tools specifically for Wall Street professionals – stay tuned!)

Finance professionals need tools that can sift through troves of data, contextualize stock price movements with recent news / announcements, and surface insights that can actually drive decision making. The cherry on the top is if the tools can think like a top bucket analyst and produce reasoned insights without needing constant prompts (you can just get unpaid college interns if you want to deal with constant prompting).

How I’m using AI to streamline my workflows

A ChatGPT summary of an earnings call might tell you a company beat expectations, but it won’t tell you why analysts are suddenly bearish on their guidance. I’ve found that Bigdata.com connects the dots across SEC filings, market signals, transcripts, and other data sources to help give me real depth and context for my own workflows. It’s centered around three specialized agents (Watchlists, Briefs, and Workflows), each built to handle day-to-day portfolio management. 

I’ve actually started using BigData to manage my Autopilot portfolio strategies and can’t imagine running them without the help of AI. You may recall that I recently launched 3 portfolios that allow my followers to automatically invest alongside my high conviction ideas.

Actively managing three portfolios and keeping subscribers updated on a consistent basis is a difficult task, but luckily Bigdata allows me to manage the entire workflow seamlessly and quickly through their three specialized agents. 

One tracks my portfolio, one writes my daily digest, and one automates my recurring analysis. 

I use it to stay up to date on news, inform my investment decisions with filings, hear executive perspectives with recaps on earnings calls, analyze company performance, identify hiring trends, conduct market analysis, predict market reactions, and forecast future performance.

Here’s a quick screenshot of how my portfolio watchlist looks on Bigdata:

I don’t feel as though I have to babysit the tool. I’ve set it up so that it auto-generates daily updates on the names I care about and sends me briefs before & after earnings / key macro events. It has become part of my workflow rather than just another Chrome tab that I’ve had open for too long.

For example, instead of just asking “Can you summarize the current tariff war?” and can take it a step further and ask Bigdata “How might the ongoing trade tensions and tariffs impact tech sector earnings and my watchlist in the next quarter?” and instantly get a relevant digest of each name, fully-sourced and up-to-date based on the latest news unfolding (more on how Bigdata makes that possible below).

I know this is a specific use case that is most applicable to those who deal in the public markets, but I can assure you there are a whole host of tools being created for investment bankers, private equity investors, and VCs that assist from pitch deck creation, expediting due diligence, financial model automation, and more. I’ve invested in a handful (such as Rose AI and Dili), but I’ll save a deep dive into private market tools for another week.

A quick double click into Bigdata

The example I highlighted above is unique to Bigdata.com, as a general-purpose product like ChatGPT or Claude isn’t optimized for this type of analysis. It is also in part due to the fact that Bigdata’s parent company, RavenPack, has been a leading data analytics provider in the hedge fund space for over two decades now. Because of this, they have built the most powerful “RAG” platform for finance, with the deepest dataset spanning both structured and unstructured data. 

Don’t work in the AI space or know what a RAG is? I’ll elaborate:

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an AI technique that combines information retrieval with large language models (LLMs). RAG helps AI tools produce more relevant, accurate, and up-to-date responses. 

If you've ever asked ChatGPT a question and gotten a confidently wrong answer, you’ve seen what happens when AI hallucinates. You’re wondering “what the hell is wrong with this thing?”

RAG helps clear up the AI’s brain fog and lets it fact-check itself in real time by pulling in external sources before generating a response. Kind of like one of those useful interns who actually bothers to double check their work before handing you a deliverable.

Bigdata.com takes this a step further with a hybrid RAG system that doesn’t just rely on basic keyword searches. It layers in semantic and analytics-driven search to surface deeper insights. That search is guided by a financial knowledge graph that maps over 12 million entities, so when it surfaces insights its pulling documents and it’s context (it actually understands how macro themes, company performance, and sentiment are all interlinked). In action, you see this when instead of giving you just a generic summary, it connects the dots across filings, earnings calls, and market trends. 

And there’s your Sunday morning fun fact.

Wanna try it out for yourself? Check it out here

Wrapping it up

Outside of finance, AI is weaving itself into everything. Cranking out AI-generated graphics, changing how video editing works, AI-powered assistants, generating logos, driving cars... even your Excel formulas are getting smarter with AI-driven suggestions. AI is penetrating and enhancing every industry of our society, you owe it to yourself to find and master the tools that will level up your career. 

In the context of finance, the goal of most tools (and companies) isn’t to outright replace analysts, PMs, or researchers, but rather to offload the manual, time-consuming tasks so their human capital can focus on the bigger picture and make the most informed decisions.

If you’ve been using any interesting AI tools (particularly in the finance, venture capital, legal, recruiting, or image / video editing areas), please reply to this email as I’m always on the lookout to level up my own game. There’s new tools popping up every day and I look forward to uncovering the next big thing. 

Best,
Lit