It feels as if the World Cup was ages ago, already. Yet only a few weeks ago, I was gripped. And for once I thought England had a world-class side…. but hey ho, football hasn’t come home for another four years.
I had a road trip through France in July, which was lovely. I am pleased to report that the infrastructure for charging electric cars in France is considerably ahead of what we have in the UK – not least because of the EU rule that you have to be able to just ‘pay as you go’ with a credit card, without signing up to some irritating app.
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 (UPDATED 21 Feb) 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.
Estimate the next set of dividends I can expect – based on a screenshot of my portfolio – good dopamine hit!
Disaster scenarios – examining the disaster scenarios my portfolio faces, and the warning signals for each
As a taster I’ve appended below what Claude said when I asked it what Warren Buffett/Charlie Munger would think of my portfolio.
October in the markets was one of those slightly giddy months. My portfolio crossed through a big number threshold, and kept going up.
The market stats don’t quite tell the whole story. On a constant currency basis, markets rose 2.8%. Non-UK currencies (AUD, EUR, USD) rose (versus the GBP) about 1.7% too. So my weighted benchmark rose 4.6%, measured in GBP. My (leveraged) portfolio‘s rise of 5.3% is roughly in line with that.
A 5% gain in one month is pretty extraordinary, but it does happen. While October was the best month since January 2023 (+6.6%), I have had 7 better months in the last 13 years.
However, what the market stats don’t show is what it really felt like in October.
FIRE v London 