16.30 - 17.15:  Alan ZHANG (Ivy College of Business, Iowa State University) presents “Generative AI and asset management”. Joint work with J. Sheng, Z. Sun and B. Yang.

This paper studies whether and how generative AI (with a focus on ChatGPT) is adopted in asset management, and whether adoption improves investment performance. It builds a new measure of AI adoption by hedge funds, and shows that the proportion of hedge funds adopting AI has been sharply increasing since the launch of ChatGPT, up to 60% in 2024. Hedge funds that adopted ChatGPT outperformed non-adopters.

17.15 - 18.00: Robert Richmond (New York University Stern School of Business and NBER) presents “Asset embeddings”. Joint work with X. Gabaix, R. Koijen and M. Yogo.

This paper proposes a new approach to study similarities between assets. Specifically, it builds a “map” of the stock market by learning from institutional investors’ portfolios which assets tend to be held together. From these holdings, it produces numerical representations of assets (embeddings), which contain information on the drivers of investors’ portfolios that is not captured by standard financial ratios and industry labels.