High School Pupil's Cryptic ChatGPT Stock Trading Mechanism Outperforming Russell 2000 Index
In an unexpected turn of events, a high school student from rural Oklahoma, Nathan Smith, has made waves in the financial world with his ChatGPT-enhanced micro-cap stock bot. Over the past four weeks, Smith's bot has delivered a remarkable 23.8% return, significantly outperforming traditional benchmarks such as the Russell 2000 index, which gained approximately 3.9%, and the biotech ETF XBI, which rose about 3.5% in the same period.
The bot's setup, fully open-source and available on Smith's GitHub repo, operates by selecting stocks under $300 million market cap once per week. It focuses on volatile micro-cap names, especially in the biotech sector, and trades are manually executed by Smith himself.
Despite the promising short-term results, it's important to note that the experiment is limited to one month so far and is considered exploratory rather than a proven investment strategy. The objective of the experiment was to generate maximum returns from June 27 to December 27, 2025.
Smith's journey into the world of finance began almost by accident, but he fell in love with Python over the summer and has since thrown himself into the world of quantitative finance. He built five main functions for his system: manual buying and selling for new picks, portfolio processing for tracking trades, daily results generation using Yahoo Finance data, and graph generation for visualizing performance against the S&P 500.
One of ChatGPT's notable moves involved CADL, a stock that generated roughly 50% of the portfolio's profits. The AI takes care of all trading decisions, including position sizing and stop loss, with minimal human intervention.
ChatGPT's Sharpe ratio is 0.9413, indicating high risk, while the Sortino ratio is 2.0021, suggesting strong upside gains with limited downside. Smith plans to extend the experiment to a full year once it wraps in December, but admits balancing it with ACT studying and self-studying for AP Psychology will be challenging.
Smith, who has made almost 1,000 GitHub commits this past year and has a good number of followers on his newsletter, hopes to continue his passion for Quantitative Finance as a real job one day. The experiment is documented and open-source, ready for anyone to try.
As we look forward, it's clear that Nathan Smith's ChatGPT-powered micro-cap stock bot has outperformed both traditional stock pickers benchmarking with the Russell 2000 and the broader market indexes in the past four weeks. However, longer-term evaluation is necessary to verify sustained effectiveness.
- Nathan Smith, the high school student from rural Oklahoma, is delving into the world of Bitcoin mining, using the profits from his ChatGPT-enhanced micro-cap stock bot.
- In the realm of finance and technology, Smith is considering ICOs as potential avenues for investing, aiming to diversify his portfolio further.
- To enhance his knowledge and skills in quantitative finance and self-development, Smith is planning to enroll in an online course focusing on crypto mining and its impact on the global market.
- As his ChatGPT-powered stock bot continues to outperform traditional benchmarks, Smith hopes to use the technology to predict trends in Bitcoin mining, aiming to make strategic decisions for maximum profit.
