Origin
Hello everyone, I am the founder of Chat2Report. Today, I want to share with you the story of how I started Chat2Report—this is the first commercial product I developed independently.
The Problem
I am a devoted follower of Buffett and Peter Lynch, a value investor, and have always had the habit of investing. If you don’t have the habit of reading financial reports, you can’t really be considered a true value investor.
Peter Lynch mentioned multiple times in "One Up On Wall Street" that you should not blindly trust professional investors, nor invest in stocks of companies you do not understand at all. Instead, use everyday life experiences to discover promising companies.
Finding companies with growth potential is only the first step in stock investing; next, careful research and analysis are required. Reading annual and quarterly reports is a very important part of this research and analysis. In addition, visiting the headquarters of listed companies and conducting field investigations are also necessary.
However, reading lengthy financial reports often consumes a lot of my time. A few years ago, before AI existed, I thought how great it would be if there were a tool that could quickly analyze financial reports and extract key information. This way, analyzing financial reports would take minutes instead of tens of minutes or even hours.
At that time, to quickly analyze listed companies, I even stopped reading financial reports and only looked at some key data. In fact, I felt uncertain because I had not conducted an in-depth analysis of the companies.
The Solution
The emergence of ChatGPT gave me hope. I started using it frequently, uploading financial reports and asking for analysis. It seemed like the ultimate solution and indeed saved me a lot of time.
However, I gradually realized it was not perfect. Sometimes it produced incorrect information, and because the sources of information could not be traced, you could never be sure whether its answers were based on the financial reports or completely fabricated.
As the number of analyzed financial reports increased, management became inconvenient. Conversations related to financial reports were scattered among regular chats and hard to find; I wished to organize them by company.
Because I need to analyze a large number of financial reports, I have saved years of reports categorized by company locally, but I have to re-upload them every time before analysis, which is very troublesome.
I have tried some alternative solutions, but none meet the requirements—they are too complicated, while I need a simple and better user experience financial report analysis tool.
Since there is no suitable tool on the market, I decided to develop one myself.
A good financial report analysis tool should have the following features:
- Answers can be traced back with cited sources to verify the authenticity of the information
- A large number of ready-made financial reports available for users to use directly
- Financial report summaries to quickly understand the reports before analysis
- Financial report mind maps for a clearer understanding of the report’s structure
- Easy management, allowing users to bookmark conversations and companies, supporting quick searches
Other products pursue comprehensiveness, trying to include all features to serve all investors. But I choose to stay focused and simple, specifically serving value investors, starting from real needs, solving the specific problems I encounter, and helping investors like me.
Future
In the future, I will continue to update this product because many envisioned features have yet to be launched, such as financial report translation, custom document uploads, and news information. My goal is simple: to make it easy for everyone to analyze financial reports.
Contact
If you have any questions, suggestions, or feedback about using the product, please feel free to provide feedback here, and I will respond as soon as possible.