AskOBB: Investment Research With a Single Prompt

Simplify your Investment Research with LLMs

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ChatGPT has shown the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs). This incredible piece of technology will change many industries. Now, various industries are developing their own tailored LLMs for their specific use cases. The financial industry has always been driven by data. LLMs can help analysts and experts to analyse big data.

At the beginning of the year, Bloomberg introduced BloombergGPT in a research paper. BloombergGPT is proprietary and not available to the general public. The AI4Finance Foundation wants to change that. The foundation develops FinGPT, an open-source alternative to BloombergGPT. We wrote an article about FinGPT. Check it out if you want to learn more about FinGPT. Meanwhile there are also tools that you can use as ChatGPT. FinChat.io is ChatGPT for investors. You enter a prompt, and FinChat gives you an answer. Another tool is AlphaWatch AI. AlphaWatch AI answers any broad question on the industry, stock prices and more.

In this article, we’ll show you AskOBB, a brand-new beta feature of the OpenBB Terminal 3.1.0. OpenBB Terminal is a product of the company OpenBB. We already wrote an article about OpenBB. The post gives you a good overview of all OpenBB products. We have tried AskOBB and want to share our experience with you.

OpenBB Terminal 3.1.0 and AskOBB

You can use AskOBB in the OpenBB Terminal 3.1.0. The OpenBB Terminal is a command-line tool for investment research. It offers you a wide range of features like technical and fundamental analysis. We have presented the OpenBB Terminal in a previous article. OpenBB Terminal 3.1.0 has a lot of exciting new functionalities. A post on the OpenBB blog describes the new features in detail. Check it out!

In this article, we focus on AskOBB, the star of the release 3.1.0. AskOBB uses an LLM so that you can interact with the OpenBB Terminal via your natural language. AskOBB transforms your prompt into an OpenBB command. That’s a difference from other financial LLMs (FinLLMs). Classic FinLLMs return a value. AskOBB is designed to return the best-matched OpenBB command. The OpenBB Team have used the power of LlamaIndex, LangChain and OpenAI to develop this impressive feature.

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How to use AskOBB?

Let’s have fun with AskOBB. First, download the OpenBB Terminal from the OpenBB website if you have not yet installed it. After that, you can start the Terminal. A login window opens.

Login OpenBB Hub (Screenshot by authors)

Now, you have to log in with your OpenBB Hub credentials. If you don’t have an account yet, you need to register. After you’ve logged in, you’ll see the following screen:

OpenBB Terminal Home (Screenshot by authors)

You find the new askobb feature under “Record and execute your own .openbb routine scripts”. With OpenBB scripts, you can automate your Investment Research. We’ll write another article on this topic. Follow us if you don’t want to miss it.

AskOBB works Prompt based. For this reason, keep the following in mind. The more information you provide, the more accurate the return.

In the OpenBB Terminal, you can call up the help menu for each command with the flag -h. Let’s take a look at how askobb works.

$ askobb -h

usage: askobb [--prompt QUESTION [QUESTION ...]] [--model {gpt-3.5-turbo,gpt-4}] [-h]

Accept input as a string and return the most appropriate Terminal command

optional arguments:
  --prompt QUESTION [QUESTION ...], -p QUESTION [QUESTION ...]
                        Question for Askobb LLM (default: )
  --model {gpt-3.5-turbo,gpt-4}, -m {gpt-3.5-turbo,gpt-4}
                        GPT Model to use for Askobb LLM (default: gpt-3.5-turbo) or gpt-4 (beta) (default: gpt-3.5-turbo)
  -h, --help            show this help message (default: False)

For more information and examples, use 'about askobb' to access the related guide.

You can choose between gpt-3.5-turbo and gpt-4 for the askobb command in addition to the question. gpt-3.5-turbo is the default model. You need to add your OpenAI key in the OpenBB Hub for gpt-4.

Great. Now, we’re ready for some examples.

First example — Historical dividends of Apple

We want to compare Apple’s historical dividends. Let us assume that we don’t know the matching OpenBB command. We can easily ask AskOBB with natural language.

AskOBB: Historical dividends of Apple (GIF by authors)

AskOBB analyses the prompt and returns the matching OpenBB command. In our case, we get the following OpenBB command:

stocks/fa/divs -t AAPL -l 16

The command provides us with the last 16 dividend payouts. Why 16? The default value is 16. We get the following table as output:

Apple dividends over the past years (Screenshot by authors)

Second example — Candlestick Chart of Apple stock

Now, we’ll show you a more complex example. Our prompt looks as follows:

Prompt: Create a candlestick chart of Apple stock over the last 12 months with a moving average of 7.

This prompt contains the following steps:

• Load Apple stock data over the last 12 months

• Calculate the moving average of 7 days

• Plot the candlestick chart of Apple

The following GIF shows the procedure in the OpenBB Terminal.

AskOBB: Candlestick Chart of Apple stock (GIF by authors)

AskOBB suggests the following OpenBB command:

/stocks/load AAPL -s 2022-07-11 -e 2023-07-11/candle --ma 7

We confirm with yes. And then, we get the following chart as output:

Candlestick Chart of Apple stock over the last 12 months (Screenshot by authors)

The AskOBB command saves you a lot of work, especially if you are not yet familiar with the OpenBB commands. AskOBB boosts your Investment Research to the next level. That’s an impressive step in the right direction.

Conclusion

In this article, we showed you the new AskOBB feature of the OpenBB Terminal 3.1.0. AskOBB transforms a prompt into an OpenBB command. You learned how to use the askobb command. AskOBB boosts your market research because you can use it with your natural language. You don’t need to know all the OpenBB commands by heart.

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