What This Is
I built my dad a research analyst that never sleeps
I asked Claude to make my dad's portfolio more money without him having to lift a finger. What it built blew us both away.
Every weekday morning, Claude now reads the market, checks his exact stocks, breaks down any earnings, and watches where the big institutional money is moving. Then it writes all of it into one personalized research report, built around the specific things he owns and the goals he actually has, and has it waiting for him before he's awake. Once a month it does a deeper check-up. My dad said it's better information than the financial advice he used to pay for.
Here's the honest part, up front: this will not beat the market, and nothing it produces is financial advice. It doesn't pick stocks, predict prices, or make trades. What it does is turn hours of manual research into a five-minute read, so the person reading it is more informed and does zero work. "More informed, less manual," not "secret edge."
And you can build this for anyone who invests: your dad, your mom, your clients if you advise people, yourself, or anybody you care about who owns stocks and would never sit down to research them on a Sunday.
Read This First
The one privacy rule that makes this work
You will never type a dollar amount into this. Not once. Every piece of analysis runs on percentages of the portfolio, not balances. "30% in this fund, 5% in that stock." That's all Claude ever sees.
Why this is the unlock: you can build it for your dad without him ever telling you his net worth. You can build it for a client without touching sensitive numbers. And the analysis is exactly as good either way, because percentages are what actually drive every conclusion.
When there are multiple accounts (say a Traditional IRA and a Roth), you don't need dollars there either. You just tell Claude the rough ratio between them ("the Traditional is about 20x the Roth"). That ratio lets it blend everything into one true picture without a single balance.
The Guardrails
The honest disclaimers (keep these in the build)
This is research, not advice.
Everything Claude produces is information staged for a human to review. It never recommends a buy or sell, predicts a price, or promises a return. We tell it to stamp "this is news, not advice" on every output.
It never touches money.
No trades, no transfers, no logins, no passwords. It reads, researches, analyzes, and drafts. That's the entire job.
The reader is always the decision-maker.
Claude does the grunt work. The human makes every call.
Free data isn't Bloomberg.
This runs on public info: market data, filings, news, transcripts. It's genuinely useful. It is not a $24,000 terminal, and I'll be honest about where the limits are.
Setup (~2 Minutes)
What you need, and the agents that power it
You'll use the Claude desktop app. It's the one with a working folder, scheduled tasks, and connectors, the features that make the daily-report magic possible. You also want a Gmail connector (for the report delivery) and web search turned on.
Brand new to these agents? I wrote a separate 2-minute guide that just installs the three finance agents and shows you how to use them by hand: Claude's Finance Agents for Investors. Skim that first if you've never installed them, then come back here to automate them.
Open Settings → Plugins → Add plugin
Paste this URL: https://github.com/anthropics/financial-services
Install financial-analysis (the core pack), equity-research, and wealth-management. The three agents you'll hear me name (Market Researcher, Earnings Reviewer, Model Builder) come bundled inside those packs.
How the named agents map to the work, so it's not a black box:
Market Researcher · equity-research
Daily market and dip watch, news on the holdings, institutional-money flow.
Earnings Reviewer · equity-research
Plain-English earnings recaps when a holding reports.
Model Builder · financial-analysis
Valuation sanity-checks when you want to know if a price makes sense.
Portfolio review recipe · wealth-management
The goal-scoring and "is this drifting?" analysis.
Skip the premium data connectors (FactSet, S&P, PitchBook, etc.) for now. They need paid subscriptions, and you don't need a single one to get real value. We feed Claude public data instead. Every step below comes with a copy-paste prompt: paste them exactly, swap in the brackets, and let Claude work.
Phase 1
Point Claude in the right direction
Before Claude touches anyone's portfolio, you want it reasoning like a careful analyst, and crystal clear that it gives research, never advice. This first prompt sets the rules of the whole project.
Copy-paste prompt
I want to build an automated investing research assistant for [my dad / my mom / a client / myself]'s stock portfolio. Important ground rules, hold these for the entire project: - You are NOT a financial advisor and must never give buy or sell advice. - Everything you produce is research and organization for a human to review and decide on. Never predict prices or promise returns. - You will never need dollar amounts. We work entirely in percentages. Before we start: confirm you understand those rules in one line. Then tell me which of your wealth-management and equity-research skills are most useful for (a) analyzing a personal portfolio and (b) keeping the owner informed over time.
You're looking for Claude to confirm the rules and name the relevant skills. Now it's in the right headspace.
Phase 2
Give it a home
Everything (the profile, the holdings, every analysis, every daily report) should live in one folder so it builds a history you can work out of. Swap [Person] for whoever you're building for.
Copy-paste prompt
Create a folder called "[Person] Portfolio" in my workspace. Everything we build (their goals profile, holdings breakdown, analyses, and the daily and monthly reports) should be saved there so I can come back to it anytime.
Phase 3
Let Claude interview the investor
A portfolio can only be judged against goals, so don't skip this. And here's the move that makes it great: don't summarize the person's goals yourself. Have Claude drill them with clear multiple-choice questions, one batch at a time. The answers come out concrete instead of vague.
This is the part that got my dad. Claude asked him better questions than anyone managing his money ever had.
Copy-paste prompt: run the interview
Before any analysis, interview [the investor] to understand their goals. Ask a batch of clear multiple-choice questions, one screen at a time, then a second batch to go deeper. Keep the language plain (assume they are smart but not a finance person). Cover all of this: - Time horizon (when they expect to need or retire on this money) - Real risk tolerance (their gut reaction to a sudden drop) - Income needs (are they living off it, or still growing it) - Protection vs. growth (how much they value crash protection) - Account types (taxable brokerage vs. retirement accounts) - Comfort with options / hedging tools - Concentration (how big their single largest holding feels) - Cash on hand (dry powder for buying dips) Ask the questions as multiple choice so the answers are concrete. Wait for each answer before moving on.
The exact question bank I used (reuse it):
Round 1: goals & temperament. (1) In how many years do you expect to need or retire on this money? (2) If the market suddenly dropped about 30%, what's your gut reaction: buy more, sit tight, or sell? (3) Are you currently living off this portfolio, or still growing it? (4) How important is crash protection, even if it slightly lowers your returns in good years?
Round 2: structure & mechanics. (5) Is this money mostly in taxable brokerage accounts or retirement accounts? (6) How comfortable are you with options, like buying "put" insurance on a stock? (7) Roughly how big is your single biggest holding: a small slice, a chunk, or a huge piece? (8) About how much is sitting in cash or very safe stuff right now?
Once the answers are in, save them to a profile file:
Copy-paste prompt: save the profile
Summarize their answers into an investor profile and save it as "[person]-investor-profile.md" in the folder. Include: - A one-line "who this investor is" summary - A simple goals table - An early read on what to watch for, before we even see the holdings
Now Claude has goals in writing. Everything it judges from here is judged against these, not some generic idea of "good investing."
Phase 4
Hand it the holdings (percentages only)
This is where the privacy rule earns its keep. Percentages drive the entire analysis. Dollar amounts add risk and add nothing. Get the holdings however is easiest (a screenshot they read off to you, a quick list, whatever), then strip it to ticker + percentage.
Copy-paste prompt
Here are the holdings. No dollar amounts, just ticker and % of that account. If there are multiple accounts (like a Traditional IRA and a Roth IRA), list each separately and tell me roughly how big each account is compared to the others (for example, "the Traditional is about 20x the Roth"). That ratio lets you build the true blended picture without any dollar figures. [ACCOUNT 1 NAME, e.g. Traditional IRA] TICKER: XX.X% TICKER: XX.X% ... [ACCOUNT 2 NAME, e.g. Roth IRA] TICKER: XX.X% ...
The one trick that matters: the relative size ratio between accounts. "Traditional is about 20x the Roth" is the only thing Claude needs to blend two accounts into one true allocation, without ever knowing a balance. If there's only one account, ignore this entirely.
Phase 5
The analysis (this is the core)
This is where it stops being a list of tickers and becomes real insight. We make Claude verify its own work at two points: confirm what every ticker actually is with a web search (fund tickers are easy to misread), and check the bucket math programmatically so the percentages actually add up.
Copy-paste prompt
Now analyze the portfolio. Do these steps in order:
1. Identify what every ticker actually is. Use web search to confirm each fund, ETF,
or stock. Do not guess from memory. Flag anything that looks like a typo.
2. Sort everything into buckets: stocks (split into growth, dividend/defensive,
index, and international), bonds, and cash. Save a clean holdings file per account.
3. Do the math and double-check it programmatically: each bucket's % and the totals.
The percentages must add up to about 100%. Verify it.
4. If there are multiple accounts, use the size ratio I gave you to compute the TRUE
blended allocation across everything combined.
5. Score the portfolio against their three goals (growth, downside protection, and
dry powder, meaning cash ready to buy dips) with a short verdict on each.
6. Surface the non-obvious insights, specifically:
- Asset location: is the fast-growing stuff sitting in the tax-free (Roth) account
where it belongs, and the income/bonds in the account that gets taxed on
withdrawal?
- Hidden overlap: do an actively managed growth fund + an S&P 500 index fund +
any individually held mega-cap stocks all secretly own the SAME companies?
Quantify the stacked exposure.
- Real vs. fake concentration: is the "biggest holding" actually a diversified fund
(low risk) or a single stock (higher risk)?
7. Write it all in plain English, like you're explaining it to a smart friend who
doesn't work in finance. End with a clear "this is research, not financial advice"
line and a short "levers to consider, your call" list. No recommendations to buy
or sell anything.
Save the full analysis to the folder. The insights this reliably uncovers, and the ones that make jaws drop:
- A portfolio that looks dangerously concentrated but isn't, because the top holdings are funds, not single stocks.
- A smart tax setup the owner didn't even know they had (growth parked in the Roth).
- Hidden tech overlap: owning the same handful of mega-caps three different ways (a growth fund, an index fund, and individual shares) without realizing it. This one gets everybody.
- A portfolio that's far more defensive than the owner believes, with a pile of idle cash doing nothing.
This is the moment my dad went from "okay, neat" to "wait, do this every day."
Phase 6
Put it on autopilot (the scheduled routines)
A one-time analysis is a nice afternoon. Scheduled routines are what make this a system that works while you sleep. The one design rule learned the hard way: consolidate. Don't make one task per topic, or you'll bury the reader in five reports a day. Build ONE weekday "Morning Digest" and ONE monthly "Check-Up."
The cron schedules (paste them as-is): 30 6 * * 1-5 for weekday mornings ~6:30am, and 0 7 1 * * for the 1st of each month ~7am.
A scheduled run has no memory of your chat. It wakes up cold, so the prompt carries the holdings and goals inside itself. That's why this one's long. Paste the whole thing.
Copy-paste prompt: daily digest
Create a scheduled task called "daily-portfolio-digest" that runs every weekday morning. Each run is fully self-contained and has no memory of past chats, so I'm embedding the holdings and goals directly here: GOALS: [paste the one-line investor summary + the 3 goals from the profile] HOLDINGS: [paste the final blended allocation, ticker + % by bucket] Each morning, using web search, build ONE report with these sections, and only show a section if it has something to say that day: 1. MARKET & DIP WATCH (always): the S&P 500 level and how far below its recent high it is. State a simple "zone": calm / pullback / correction / bear. If it's down 10% or more, lead with a buy-the-dip note tied to their cash-on-hand plan. 2. EARNINGS (only if one of the holdings reported in the last ~2 days): a ~100-word plain-English recap each (beat or miss, the key takeaways, how the stock reacted, and "does this matter for a long-term holder?"). 3. HOLDINGS NEWS (always, light): 2-4 bullets on notable moves in the holdings and why they moved. 4. INSTITUTIONAL & INSIDER ACTIVITY (see the add-on section, include it). 5. WEEK AHEAD (Mondays only): upcoming earnings dates for the holdings, dividends, Fed meetings, and key economic data. Assemble it into ONE clean report. End every report with "This is news, not advice." Then save a dated copy to the folder, and deliver it as a draft (see the delivery step below).
Copy-paste prompt: monthly check-up
Create a second scheduled task called "monthly-portfolio-checkup" that runs on the 1st of each month. Using the same embedded goals and holdings, it should: - Re-run the growth / protection / dry-powder scorecard using the past month's market context. - Flag any drift from the target picture, and re-check the hidden-overlap risk. - Note anything genuinely worth discussing with a licensed professional. - Keep it under ~500 words. - End with "This is research, not advice." Save a dated copy to the folder and deliver it as its own report draft.
Tasks run locally while the app is open.
If the app is closed when one is due, it runs the next time you open it. They don't run with your computer off. (True always-on cloud scheduling is a more advanced setup; the local version is plenty to start.)
Hit "Run now" once after creating each task.
From the Scheduled panel. That pre-approves the tools it needs (web search, Gmail) so future morning runs don't pause for permission.
Phase 7
Get the report in front of them
Files are great for you, the builder. The person reading it shouldn't have to open an app or hunt through a folder. Email is just the frictionless pipe that drops the report where they already look every morning. The value is the briefing inside.
The honest limitation, up front: the Gmail connector usually creates a draft, not a sent email. So the realistic outcome is a fully written report appears as a draft in your inbox every morning, and you (or they) tap Send. That one tap is the only manual step in the whole system. True silent auto-send needs a send-capable tool or a developer setup, so don't promise hands-off auto-send if all you've got is the draft-only connector.
Copy-paste prompt
For both scheduled tasks, make the final step a Gmail DRAFT addressed to [reader@email.com], with a dated subject line. Format the report as clean, simple HTML (headings, short paragraphs, bullets) and include a plain-text version too. Do NOT send. Just create the draft so it can be reviewed and sent with one tap. Keep saving a dated copy to the folder as well.
Pro move to keep their inbox clean: tell the noisy sections to only draft when there's something to say. Only surface a dip alert when the market is actually down. Only include earnings on days a holding actually reported. Want it pointed straight at the investor? Address the draft to them instead of you, and you're out of the loop entirely.
The Add-On
Institutional & insider money flow
This is the part everyone asks about: "Can it track where the big money's going so we get in early?" Here's the honest answer. Quarterly 13F filings come out on a ~45-day delay (context, not an early signal). Real-time flow like dark pools is expensive, paywalled data. Retail generally can't front-run institutions. Treat this as "stay informed," not "guaranteed edge."
The good news: a lot is legitimately free and worth watching, and it slots right into the daily digest. Insider buying and selling (Form 4, filed within ~2 days, where a cluster of insiders buying is the more meaningful signal). Activist or 5%+ stakes (13D/13G). Analyst upgrades, downgrades, and price-target changes. And a quick sector-rotation read.
Copy-paste prompt: bolt it onto the digest
Add an "Institutional & Insider Activity" section to the daily digest. Cover, briefly: - Insider buying/selling (Form 4) on the holdings. Call out clusters of buying. - Any new activist or 5%+ stakes (13D/13G) in the holdings. - Analyst rating and price-target changes on the holdings. - Notable recent 13F moves (state clearly that 13F data is ~45 days delayed). - A 1-2 line read on which sectors money is rotating into or out of. End the section with one honest line: these are public, often-delayed signals, useful for staying informed, not a guaranteed way to profit.
That last honest line isn't optional. It's what keeps this trustworthy instead of hype.
Before You Go
Gotchas & honest limits
Draft, not send.
The Gmail connector likely only drafts. One human tap is still required unless you go the developer route.
The app has to be open.
Local scheduled tasks need the app running, or they catch up next time you open it. It's not a cloud cron.
Free data isn't Bloomberg.
The institutional/flow section is good, not professional-grade. Paid connectors exist if you outgrow it.
Verify, verify.
Make Claude confirm tickers with search and check the bucket math. Fund tickers get misread, and percentages must sum to ~100%.
Never advice.
Keep the "research, not recommendations, not a licensed advisor" line on every output. This is the rule that makes it safe to run for someone you love.
Make It Yours
Build it for anyone who invests
The framework is identical for anyone. To rebuild it for a different person, swap in their goal answers (Phase 3) and their holdings percentages (Phase 4). That's the only thing that changes. Adjust the dip-watch thresholds and cadence to taste, and point the report at whoever should read it. The investor themselves is cleanest, because then you're not in the loop at all.
Build it for your dad. Then your mom. Then a client. Then yourself. Same seven phases every time.
My dad gets a market briefing on his own holdings every day now, the kind of thing he used to pay for. He's more informed than he's ever been. And he didn't have to do a thing. Go build it for someone.
Not financial advice, mine or Claude's. It's research and organization. Every output is a draft for a human to review. Verify before you act on anything.
Work with Me
Want me on your problem for an hour?
Book a 1:1 call and we build the fix live — the workflow you want automated, the tool you can’t crack, whatever’s stuck. Direct, hands-on, no pitch waiting at the end.