Buyside AI Reviews
@buysideaireviews.bsky.social
Former mega fund and credit hedge fund investor writing in-depth reviews of AI tools for finance. Visit www.buysideaireviews.com for the latest write ups. No paywall.
Tempted to buy Factset $FDS here at 11x 2027E earnings … everyone acting like it’s a foregone conclusion Claude is going to eat all finance data providers.
A real example of why you should be careful when using general-purpose LLMs for investment research below: The brilliance of LLMs is that the output always sounds professional and thorough, but that’s also the danger.
Using AI for investment idea generation: semantic screening. A great AI use case for me has been incorporating semantic (qualitative) search criteria into traditional quantitative screens.
Good piece on AI for credit document analysis. One line I disagree with to some extent is - "smaller investing firms can suddenly compete with bigger firms". www.ft.com/content/b42f...
Human connection still needed in credit investing
AI is a natural technology for the industry, but traders and investors still need to stress-test strategies with experts
ft.com
This week’s review is focused on Portrait Analytics, an AI-powered investment research platform for public equity investors. I’ve been using Portrait for the past couple of weeks and found it to be especially helpful for getting up to speed on new ideas.
Will be very interesting to see how private credit funds come to terms with their outsized software exposure (greater than a 20% weighting in Blackstone and HPS private credit portfolios as an example).
Will all software companies just become Bending Spoons portcos
As a first year analyst I should have used the "I'm as bad as I'll ever be" line to make people nicer re: my modeling mistakes.
Finance-specific AI platforms I’m planning to write reviews on next include Portrait Analytics, Compound AI, and Quartr Pro . All of these will be posted on the website for free, so stay tuned.
Gave Claude for Excel the analyst/associate modeling test that I used in my prior reviews of Excel AI agents and while it was able to complete the test (ie. much better than Ramp Sheets for example), it still made some basic modeling errors w/ sloppy formatting choices and random hardcodes.
Free earnings/conference transcript resources and AI-driven transcript analysis: My write up this week highlighted three sources for free transcripts: @quartr.com , roic .ai ,and edmundSEC. If you know of any others, drop them in the comments.
Is my take on Claude Cowork crazy? Doesn't seem to be the step change everyone says it is. Sure, Claude models now have access to the user's files instead of files being uploaded via web interface...
Cue all of the "Claude is AGI" and "end of knowledge work" posts for Claude Cowork ... Meanwhile Claude:
The “AI workflows series” is live on the website. Focus of these types of posts will be on distinct, interesting finance use cases (often comparing multiple AI products at once).
Aldi competing against $WMT in the grocery space is interesting. I did a bunch of research on grocers when covering The Fresh Market back in the day when the bonds were distressed. As part of this, I did a tour of Aldi stores in New Jersey via an expert network.
Feel like "podcast slop" is a problem, especially when founders come on to discuss their new AI startups. We need more live demos instead of long-form podcasts.
Hearing a lot about AI in finance but feeling behind the curve in terms of actually using it? Check out an example of a real AI use case that you can implement today: AI Workflow: monitoring direct lending loan issuance trends via BDC filings (run as soon as 10-Q/K is released)
Starting off the year with another in-depth review of an AI tool for financial analysis. This time, I am reviewing Hudson Labs, an AI solution worth trying for public equity investors. See key takeaways below. The full write up includes screenshot outputs from my test drive (example below).
Over the past month, I have posted in-depth reviews on several of the latest finance AI tools, including Shortcut AI, Ramp Sheets, and Hudson Labs. Visit the website to check these out and stay up to date on the latest advances in AI for finance.
I started Buyside AI Reviews with a simple goal: to try out AI tools for finance in the context of real workflows and share my findings. Because from looking at demo (hype) videos and sponsored posts, it’s really hard to figure out how good these tools actually are.