Perplexity Finance is one of the hottest things to have happened lately in the fields concerning business sector in India and AI. Ever since the tool was released, retail investors are increasingly trying it out for financial advice and strategy.
A prominent Indian trader, Rahul Mathur, tested the capabilities of Perplexity Finance‘s new chatbot with the Indian market data and documented his findings on a video that he shared on X (former Twitter). The results? The AI chatbot proved its worth, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.
Trader tasks Perplexity Finance to make strategy for him
Mathur’s objective was straightforward: to have the chatbot formulate a viable Futures & Options (F&O) strategy. While the AI chatbot successfully generated a detailed plan, its execution revealed a crucial disconnect with real-world market mechanics. The strategy was rendered impractical because the AI failed to account for fundamental rules of the Indian F&O segment, such as mandated minimum lot sizes and even recommending stocks that are not on the F&O list at all.
In addition to these structural errors, the chatbot also exhibited a “recency bias.” It disproportionately recommended stocks that Mathur had recently probed, suggesting the tool was over-indexing on the user’s immediate history rather than providing a holistic, data-driven analysis of the broader market. Mathur pointed out that this kind of bias could lead a novice investor down a narrow and risky path, missing out on more lucrative or stable opportunities elsewhere.
Is Perplexity Finance not worth using?
Despite these critical flaws, Mathur did not dismiss the Perplexity Finance chatbot outright. He highlighted several positive features that could make it a strong business tool. The ability to create a personalised tracker for Indian stocks and the tool’s sheer speed in synthesising information were lauded as “very powerful” for a new release.
He concluded that the chatbot, which is free to access through an Airtel partnership, essentially gives every Indian retail investor “a superhuman investment researcher in their pocket.” The tool is democratising access to a professional level of analysis, he said. The experiment demonstrates that while AI is an invaluable asset for research and ideation, it’s still not yet a substitute for human oversight and a deep understanding of market realities. Hence, traders will need to rely on their geniuses depsite using such AI tools.
