Using AI to crunch numbers in Excel - Dividend Machines by The Fifth Person

Q&A › Category: Miscellaneous › Using AI to crunch numbers in Excel

Lawrence Tan asked 1 month ago

Hi all, The system Rusmin and the gang taught us is powerful. But crunching in the numbers into the template can be time-consuming. Have anyone tried or developed any AI to help with the crunching? Just exploring.

1 Answers

0 Vote Up Vote Down

Leonard Ng answered 1 month ago

Hi Lawrence,
I believe it's possible to train AI to ingest unstructured data in financial statements and respond to a series of prompts to display the information in excel formats. But a lot of effort will be needed to train the model to reduce hallucination and improve the accuracy of the data extraction process.

There is a pay to use platform that I found last year: Tickerdata.com. It's not RAG AI. However, it has a massive database of financial information. It also allows you to transform the data into various formats and graphs in excel. It is most likely written in python. I believe the fees are much lower than other platforms used by professionals (eg. Bloomberg terminal, CapIQ, Factset...etc). I've not used it but it looks compelling. If I'm a retail investor that spends all my time analyzing many stocks, I may consider paying for it.

For me, i manually extract data from financial statements. I usually extract data from 5 to 10 years of financial statements for each company that I analyze. I usually spend more time with the first financial statement since I need to familiarize myself with the format and data. But data extraction for subsequent financial statements from the same company will be much faster since I'm already familiar with the format and location of the data that I'm interested in.

Looking at the financial statements also allows me to read the notes. The notes provide a lot of insights about the data. I usually copy and paste notes that I don't understand into Gemini so that it can provide me with more insights. I believe it will take a lot of training for AI to be able to ingest the notes of financial statements and reason with it.

Another method I used to speed up the data extraction process is the usage of 2 monitors. 1 monitor to display the financial statement and another monitor to record the data in excel.

That said, because I only do this in my free time, it still takes me around 3 weeks to complete a full analysis of a company. I'm always trying to explore if there are other reasonably priced tech that can speed up my laborious time consuming analysis.