American journalist and NASDAQ Marketsite Jane King interviews Eldad Tamir, the Founder & CEO of FINQ, an AI-powered investment platform for everyone where big data and science replace the biased human intermediary. The company aims to democratize investing – from seasoned to greener investors. By intelligently structuring vast data sets and transforming them into actionable insights, FINQ not only empowers investors with superior data but also provides investors with the information they need to make informed, timely, and, above all, effective decisions.
In this interview, Eldad talks about the traditional financial industry’s much-needed shake-up, the track record of humans vs. AI in investing, and how FINQ is working to break down barriers and empower investors of all levels to achieve their financial goals.
Jane: FINQ harnesses the power of AI to develop a 100% objective platform that offers top-of-the-line investment solutions and allows anyone to become a smart investor, and with me to explain more about how this all works is the CEO Eldad Tamir, a leading figure in Israeli high-tech and Global Financial markets. So great to have you here, Eldad. So wonderful to hear how you’re shaking up the traditional financial system. So why don’t you lay the groundwork about FINQ, then we’ll dig a little deeper.
Eldad: Okay, let’s talk. Let’s start with what we have today. I mean, there have been many, many revolutions in the digital space like Amazon, and Booking.com. But still, in Finance, which is a huge market, people tend to buy their financial products in ways that have been here for more than a hundred years. They go to their financial advisor, they go to the bank, and they try to do it by themselves. And it’s kind of strange there are many caveats to using those old methods. I mean, one of them is usually the financial intermediate is not objective. It is usually kind of a salesman that works for someone and you never know because he has a nice suit and tie but he represents his own interest. The other caveat is that he doesn’t really master big data or AI. He has this limited amount of data, and what you can do with AI is just miracles. I mean, we can process tons of data about any stocks or any product and bring in many, many aspects that people don’t have today and create a very simple machine by machine learning and AI that tells you when to buy a specific stock or sell a specific stock or how to manage your portfolio.
Now, everything is automatic and the input is huge. We are probably the biggest data buyer in the world today because we buy tons of data to process into our AI to come to conclusions, so it’s a bit like ChatGPT – you don’t have to look for something, you just get the answer and create really good returns.
Jane: So tell me about the data that you input into this. So you say you buy it. I mean. Is this everything from currency prices and oil and geopolitics? What goes into it?
Eldad: Yes, everything. I mean, that’s what’s really nice about machine learning, big data, and AI. I need tons of data and I don’t really have to decide beforehand how relevant the data is – it only has to make sense.
So we put it into three families: one family of data, we call it the Fundamentals. So it’s like putting into our machine Bill Graham, Warren Buffett, and all the theory of investing from the last 100 years into that, like multiples and P/E ratios, P/S, growth and profits, currencies – everything. So that’s one family. The other family is what we call the Smart Guys – the opinion of the professionals. So we know that there are people who do more research than the usual numbers that we have, like research analysts and hedge funds. So we collect all that data in a very smart way like a publication done yesterday about Amazon’s worth more than six months ago. So we have to digitize all that data. And the third one, which seems very important in our machine, is what we call the Common Wisdom or the common stupidity, it doesn’t really matter. It’s like blogs, media, social media, interviews, and newspapers – everything. People talk a lot about stocks, about friends, about everything, and we collect all that data, and together, we put all that in a machine that actually analyzes that data on a daily basis and can really give you great output.
Jane: That’s amazing. Well, that was my next question: what has the track record been of the AI versus a human?
Eldad: If you asked me 10 years ago if you could beat the indexes, I would tell you it’s really hard. But AI is changing the world everywhere because it does the work better than humans. I mean, unfortunately, or fortunately, it really depends on what you want to do in life. But if we look at the return and the S&P – since the inception in August 2022, that’s the date we started publishing, the results of our AI on our website which is finqai.com, and since that date, we have created a return of 65% and the S&P has done 24%. So that’s all automatically generated. You don’t need to do anything, so it really works. Now, we said, “Okay, if we can rank all stocks on a continuous and relative basis, we can also short some stocks.” So the bottom portfolio of shorting the worst 10 stocks that we have in our portfolios has created a plus 7%, and if you shorted the S&P, you would have done minus 25%. So again, it is almost 30% over the indexes.
Jane: Now, is this just stocks or are there others – say bonds or real estate?
Eldad: So our intention is to do everything because in order to create that machine, it’s like we have to rebuild the data in the financial industry. So today, we can take any product and break it into its ingredients like a mutual fund. We don’t look at the risk of the mutual fund – we break it into its single assets, and we can do that to any product automatically, because today, you have to publish what you have in each product. We do it to hedge funds, we can do it to almost any financial asset, and again we’re going to add to our platform more and more products like the Dao, like the NASDAQ, the healthcare indexes and mutual funds, and hedge funds and other products. The only thing we need is data. We need a lot of data. So private equity is a bit tougher because they do not have enough data, but that’s also evolving into a more transparent industry.
Jane: What does this do for the consumer? So I assume since you don’t have a lot of humans involved, that this would drive down costs or commissions? How does that work?
Eldad: We’re in the process of getting our IRA license in the United States, so once we do that, you can get into our website and then we can do it automatically from A to Z. Just get in, choose your strategy, and we can do that, and you can see the returns on a daily basis. Until then, you can really buy our data. It costs $50 a month and you can do whatever you want with it. It’s just data. But again, I really believe AI is going to change the world. It’s going to democratize services across many platforms. Until today, this kind of high-level service would serve only the rich guys, the guys that would go to family offices, and with FINQ, anybody, and anyone can really get a very, very high level of data or advice or management with a very low cost that one couldn’t even have access to beforehand.
Jane: Is this available just in Israel? You mentioned you may be coming to the US. Who can access this service at the moment?
Eldad: So our main market is the US. Our website is an American website. We have applied to get a license in the US. I believe it’s going to be very soon. We’re now selling data in the US, so that’s the main market both in terms of clients and in terms of the most important exchanges.
