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Show HN: Pebble Finance – Personalize Your Investments Today (pebble.finance)
31 points by jau-yeung 1063 days ago
Hello HN,

We are Pebble Finance! Our newly launched product offers a custom indexing solution, empowering investors to personalize their investment portfolios.

# The product

What our product is now: We are creating a platform for users to use natural language to search for their interests and personalize their portfolio.

Search is a combination of using OpenAI LLM models with Langchain, OpenSearch index, and some traditional NLP techniques. Search is divided into several tools which are selected based on the user’s input query. Based on the complexity of the input query, a single tool or a combination of tools can be used to return a list of companies for the user’s portfolio. Also based on the complexity of query search times can vary from less than a second to up to 15 seconds.

List of tools

- Themes - General themes or concepts such as type of company

- Index/ETFs - Search for common ETFs such as S&P 500, Russell1000, and Russell3000 Location - Currently we can search for US states and countries (we are going to be adding in US cities soon as well)

- Fundamental Metrics - Filter companies based on fundamental metrics such as market cap, revenue, and pe ratio

- Supplier Data - Identify companies based on their supplier relationships

What we would like to add:

We are looking to add more tools to add more functionality for users. Some tools we are looking to add are based around news integration, historic stock price, and expanding our sources of data

We are also trying to improve search speed while keeping quality of results consistent so we are looking at new ways to parse queries such as with fine tuning transformer models and looking at more traditional NLP techniques.

Challenges we have come across

We are seeing issues with trading off between speed and quality of search results. Many of the queries can take up to 15 seconds based on the complexity. Also saw issues where LLMs are producing hallucinations which led to incorrect results. We have mitigated this issue by using OpenAI’s davinci-003 model versus gpt3.5-turbo, but this also increases overall cost.

Some Example Queries

- I want to invest in eco friendly companies

- Faang without the n

- Electric cars without elon musk

- Californian companies

- Aapl

- Top marketcap companies

- ev companies with marketcap above 10 billion

- s&p without apple

# Feedback

Please try out our search capabilities on pebble.finance/themes and check the results!

We would really love honest feedback on search results, suggestions on improving results/speed, future tools, and/or general thoughts!

Thanks for reading!

The Pebble Finance Team

5 comments

That’s what I get trying to access it:

403 ERROR

The request could not be satisfied.

The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner. If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation.

Hello, we are looking into the issue! What country are you located in?
I’m in Czech Republic
we disabled geoblock so should work now. Please try again.
Please try again. Should work for all countries now.
Working fine from the US now.
Same in New Zealand
Same here
Fundamentally, I don't understand the appeal of hooking up an LLM to answer investment queries. Who is your target audience? Someone who doesn't want to invest in index funds, but also can't be bothered to do more than 2 minutes of research?
Hey - one of the founders here. Great question!

Wrt/ audience there are a lot of dimensions so to highlight some: * self-directed (vs fully managed) * values diversification (vs concentrated positions) * longer term buy-n-hold (vs yolo) * want their investments to incorporate a personal idea, need or value

You're absolutely right that some types of inquiries might only be 2 minutes of research. At the same time... a lot isn't and people might not know where to start.

If you wanted to find "cancer research companies" companies... there are hundreds. If you wanted "EVs but no Elon"... we'll help you broaden (diversify) that beyond just Rivian and Lucid.

The initial "query" here is just the tip of the funnel when it comes to portfolio construction and ultimately its automated management. But that tip alone is a pretty fun demo to play with.

Thanks for the feedback!

I get the want to immediately monetize the userbase, including to chip on overhead and whatnot, but you are competing against companies which monetize their userbase silently without the user directly paying.

I'm not sure what's truly brought to the table here until you have portfolio management (and all the costs that brings)

Interesting!

On the linked page, it’s telling me that “If I had invested $1000, I’d have $X” now. Maybe I’m missing something (on mobile)—but it might be beneficial to list when I hypothetically invested that 1k. Last month? Last year?

Thanks for the feedback! If the theme is clicked on we show the 1 month period and we show that the starting value on the graph from a month prior is $1,000 while today's value is X$ with all of the potential gains and losses during that time.

You make a good point that we should show the 1 month before we click on the theme too.

I clicked the top button and got a 400 error.
Hey there, thanks for the feedback--looks like we don't handle the case where the search input is empty :). Will submit a helpful error message for future users shortly.