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Chinese online brokerage tests first AI chatbot for stock trading as it talks to regulators about compliance

  • Up Fintech Holdings-owned Tiger Brokers is testing TigerGPT, which the company says offers timely financial information to investors
  • Like ChatGPT, the brokerage’s AI is prone to factual errors, and the company says it is talking with regulators around the world

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The app of Tiger Brokers pictured in Hong Kong on October 7, 2018. Photo: SCMP
Ben Jiangin Beijing
Tiger Brokers, an online brokerage, has created a trade bot powered by generative artificial intelligence technology, similar to what powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to test how smart machines can replace humans in bonds and stock trading.
“We’re keeping a close eye on AI and industry advancement since November last year,” Jacques Li, head of global communications at the Xiaomi-backed brokerage, told the Post in an interview on Wednesday.

TigerGPT is currently only available as an invite-only beta for a small cluster of users. Like similar services that have emerged over the past several months, the AI chatbot can generate responses to prompts on a wide range of topics. But this bot specialises in financial information, with the goal of providing timely data to help users of Tiger’s online trading platform with their investment decisions.

The Beijing-based brokerage, owned by Nasdaq-listed Up Fintech Holdings, took three months to “think thoroughly” about whether it wanted to provide its own AI to address some of the pain points of the platform’s 2 million account holders and 9 million users, Li said.

The project was initiated in January, and TigerGPT finally launched this month, making Tiger Brokers the first company to incorporate ChatGPT-like services into an online brokerage platform.

One user pain point, according to Li, was the difficulty of gathering information that is critical to assessing investment decisions. Li said TigerGPT can help users save time on market research and get more up-to-date information.

TigerGPT was trained on a vast amount of premium content that the company has access to, according to Li. The result is a chatbot capable of analysing current affairs and macroeconomic trends – such as how many times the US Federal Reserve has raised interest rates this year.

As the name would suggest, TigerGPT uses OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs) known as Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) models, according to the company. However, Tiger Brokers is using the older GPT-3 model. ChatGPT launched with GPT-3.5, while the more sophisticated GPT-4 was launched earlier this year.
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