TruthSayer AI has launched an “AI Hedge-Fund-in-a-Box” service that it claims will provide high-performing, inexpensive quantitative investment strategies for everyday retail investors, small hedge funds, and family offices.
The Vancouver-based company relies on a “Large Language Model as a Service” (LLMaaS) system that dynamically picks open-source AI models (Meta’s Llama and Mistral AI’s Mixtral) to analyze financial statements, earnings call transcripts, transactions in dark pools (private trading platforms for institutional investors), and internal trading activity (such as executives selling shares). It trades when important signals emerge from that analysis.
“Our strategies have withstood the current market turmoil.”Nizar Assanie, TruthSayer
The use of open-source models helps keep costs down while allowing TruthSayer AI to inject analytics that allow questions with “non-hallucinated” (that is, accurate) responses even in unusual scenarios, CEO and co-founder Nizar Assanie told BetaKit. His company touts a 40 percent cost reduction versus proprietary models.
The services start at $35 CAD per year ($5 month-to-month) for 250 AI-based alerts and interactions each month. Paying $71 per year ($10 month-to-month) gets 1,000 monthly interactions. Hedge funds and small family offices can get unlimited interactions, but they’ll have to contact the company for a quote.
TruthSayer claims its three in-house market indices have win rates (the rate of profitable trades) of 85 percent to 95 percent. That’s very high when professional traders do well with win rates of 40 percent to 50 percent.
Assanie maintained that TruthSayer AI would “not be judging” itself by those win rates, and that the company was focused more on making its strategies accessible to retail investors and comparing its “performance relative to markets.”
Automatic, algorithm-based trading isn’t new. A 2019 study showed that 92 percent of foreign exchange trading involved algorithms. There are already AI tools that create portfolios and make signal-based trades. However, TruthSayer’s use of on-the-fly AI model selection is comparatively novel.
The startup has raised $400,000 CAD in seed funding so far, and said in a release that it plans to raise more “in the coming months.” Other founders include CMO Nick Royle, a veteran of Zipcar, and CRO Ivan Royle, a former communications VP at GE Capital Europe.
Assanie explained to BetaKit that he saw TruthSayer AI competing both against conventional financial information vendors like Yahoo Finance as well as “robo-advisory” companies like Wealthsimple and Acorn. Retail investors are hurt in both cases, the executive argued — they either “don’t know how” to make use of information or are placed into “traditional” 60/40 portfolios (60 percent stocks, 40 percent bonds) that underperform.
The CEO was confident that the AI-driven approach could hold up in the real world. He claimed that TruthSayer’s strategies weathered the stock market crashes and surges of early April, sparked by United States (US) President Donald Trump’s trade war, with “no problems.”
“Our strategies have withstood the current market turmoil,” Assanie said.
Article Link: https://betakit.com/truthsayer-claims-its-ai-hedge-fund-in-a-box-is-a-cheaper-smarter-alternative-for-investments/
