Hongkongers’ start-up eyes 100,000 global investment pros as market for AI tool
Arbor’s ‘reasoning’ chatbot analyses text and extracts investment ideas to enhance fundamental stock analysis, company says
A technology start-up led by Hongkongers including a former Goldman Sachs analyst aims to help finance professionals and investors globally make better investment decisions with its artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot that can perform rounds of “thinking and reasoning”.
Arbor’s AI chatbot ArborChat leverages large language models (LLMs) to analyse text and extract investment ideas to enhance fundamental stock analysis, the company said. About 100 firms have used it in trials, and a few have paid for the system, which was launched two months ago, according to Cheney Cheng, Arbor co-founder and CEO. The goal is to grow the client base to 100,000 in three years, targeting the global fund industry, he said.
“We believe this wave of AI is unlocking a big blue ocean in the investment area given the ability of AI to understand and analyse tasks efficiently beyond human capability,” Cheng said. “There will be a lot of uncaptured, profitable ideas.”
Investment has traditionally been “the crystal of humanity’s wisdom”, given the amount of information and the complex analysis skills required, making it one of the hardest areas for AI to conquer, said Cheng, a former banker in mergers and acquisitions who started his career in fundamental equity investment at Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
As the technology evolves, AI can now help with more sophisticated tasks.
For example, when asked how US president-elect Donald Trump’s policies will impact companies, or a list of thousands of stocks, ArborChat would go through various steps to break down the question and collect appropriate data before providing answers backed by databases within a few minutes.
The process is what the firm calls a “ThoughtTree” approach, emulating how humans would answer a question. ArborChat typically performs two rounds of questioning and three layers of analysis, and the company plans to increase this as the chip industry matures and computational power increases, Cheng said.
