Day Trading Stocks with ChatGPT

Can artificial intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT be good stock day traders? In his March 2024 paper entitled “Can ChatGPT Generate Stock Tickers to Buy and Sell for Day Trading?”, Sangheum Cho tests whether ChatGPT 3.5 turbo supports profitable day trading. He instructs ChatGPT to pretend to be a professional day trader who picks from among U.S. listed stocks 100 to buy and 100 to sell for short-term returns based on daily Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal news blurbs on Twitter. Each day, prior to the market open, he:

• Uses the Refinitiv Eikon News Monitor to collect the selected tweets from the past 24 hours. He removes hyperlinks and duplicate tweets.
• Segments the tweets into batches to accommodate ChatGPT processing limitations.
• For each batch, asks ChatGPT to generate 100 BUY and 100 SELL signals, with 30 iterations for each batch to amplify signals by suppressing spurious selections. He then constructs equal-weighted long and short portfolios of stocks with signals.
• For each stock with signals:
  • Sums BUY and SELL signals across batches/iterations to calculate SUM_BUY and SUM_SELL signals. He constructs signal count-weighted long and short portfolios from these summed signals.
  • Subtracts SUM_SELL from  SUM_BUY to calculate NET_BUY and NET_SELL signals. He constructs signal magnitude-weighted long and short portfolios from these netted signals.

For each portfolio, he excludes stocks with zero daily volume, missing daily prices or incomplete trading histories for the previous five trading days. He measures returns from the market open to the market close. Using 222,659 tweets (only 16,359 of which are firm-specific) and daily opening and closing prices for U.S. listed common stocks during December 2022 through December 2023 (271 trading days), he finds that:

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