Tag: stocks

AI comes to FI

FIRE v London4 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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Oct ’25: Trim, trim & trim

FIRE v London1 Comment

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.

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