AI comes to FI

FIRE v London3 Comments

Rishi Sunak, the former UK prime minister and current Sunday Times journalist, observes that every CEO is talking about AI – so why aren’t political leaders? So it seems a good time to bring some AI into the world of FI blogging.

Large Language Models such as ChatGPT have been mesmerising, but it doesn’t take long playing with them to realise they are much better with Language than with Numbers. However with the latest models bringing more inference into their logic that is starting to change.

I’ve been playing with Claude and Gemini in the context of my portfolio and blog. They are proving genuinely useful. For reference, I am a paying customer of both – and am using Projects/Gems to partition my experimentation and (I believe) avoid uploading key financial data into their wider cloud/models.

Key tasks AI has proven useful for so far include:

  • Take my 24/25 tax return and estimate my tax bill for the next financial year. Gemini notably better than Claude on this one.
  • Review a 24/25 tax return for errors. A HNW friend of mine found a £100k error in his accountant-prepared tax return using Claude.
  • Update dividend yields and TERs/OCFs in my master portfolio list. This is a task made for Claude.

As a taster I’ve appended below what Claude said when I asked it what Warren Buffett/Charlie Munger would think of my portfolio.

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Jan ’26: Greenland saga doesn’t disrupt tax bill

FIRE v London2 Comments

January media seemed dominated by Greenland and Davos. As part of my efforts to avoid amplifying unstable narcissistic media-whore leaders, I haven’t got much to comment about. London has been pretty wet and miserable, as is January’s reputation.

Meanwhile, markets were up quite a bit in January, for those of us measuring in GBP. This is despite widespread mayhem over Greenland – which the markets shugged off – albeit with a mid-month wobble.

Mid-month wobble around 20 Jan

My target allocation’s markets grew 2.4% on a constant currency basis. But their currencies fell by 1.4%, meaning my benchmark rose 1.0%. Against that my actual portfolio was flat. I am a little bit underweight USA equities, and a little bit overweight International equities, which in theory is not a bad tactical position to be in. In any case, I took a couple of hits on larger individual holdings.

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Dec ’25: 2025 in review

FIRE v London6 Comments

It’s over. The year of 2025, the thirteenth year I’ve been systematically tracking my investment portfolio every month, is over.

One of the reasons I blog is to track my performance with a bit more discipline and rigour than I might manage otherwise. And part of that process is to review the portfolio not just monthly, but with a bit more depth each year.

Seven questions to assess my portfolio

For the last few years I have answered seven questions – with a variety of analyses that I don’t conduct every month. These seven questions are as follows:

Q1 – How did markets do?

Q2 – How did I do, vs my benchmark?

Q3 – What is my progress towards my retirement goals?

Q4 – How tax efficient is my portfolio?

Q5 – What fees am I paying?

Q6 – How complex is my porfolio?

Q7 – What key risks am I taking?

What’s the answer? Lots to like this year

This year is no different, insofar as I have considered each of these seven questions. But rather than simply copy/paste last year’s post, with minor updates, I’m going to cut to the punchline.

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