More personal advice. More people acting on it.
When Mezzi’s answers took more of an investor’s circumstances into account, people were more likely to follow the recommendations.
From about 1 in 4 to nearly 1 in 2.
Answers followed by a recommended purchase within ten trading days
Across all buy-advice answers, the follow-through rate was 36.2%.
Your financial picture gives that advice context. Lee Nicholson describes the value of sharing more than his stock holdings:
Your financial life extends beyond your portfolio.
“You will be rewarded greatly for the time you invest to load it up with information about your financial life. Even if you have lots of non-stock (like real estate) investments, it handles these great if you tell Mezzi what you have.”
More diversified funds. Fewer individual stocks.
The investments people chose matter, too. Purchases following Mezzi’s advice were more likely to be funds that spread money across many investments, and less likely to be shares in a single company.
Owning a few companies
More depends on how each one performs.
Owning a broad stock fund
Your money is spread across many companies.
The estimated difference for every 100 purchases:
Diversified-fund purchases
Individual-stock purchases
This also showed up in their portfolios. Broad index funds made up a larger share of investors’ holdings after they started using Mezzi. [6]
Smaller swings. Shallower declines.
The 15% finding looks at return alongside risk. In the same historical comparison, portfolios built from Mezzi’s recommendations also had smaller price swings and less severe declines from their peaks.
For an investor, the point is to consider what you earn alongside the ups and downs you take to earn it. [1]
This is a historical comparison of constructed portfolios, not returns earned by members. How the comparison works ↓
Keep more. Pay less in fund fees.
Fund fees come out of your investment, year after year. Paying less leaves more of your money invested.
The ETFs and mutual funds people bought on Mezzi’s recommendation charged lower fees than other funds those same people bought after receiving advice. The average difference was about $9 a year for every $10,000 invested. [6]
Keep the savings. Let them grow.
The savings can earn returns of their own. Here is how that could add up over 20 years.
Additional portfolio value from lower fund fees
At 7% assumed annual growth: about $16,500 more after 10 years and $64,600 more after 20 years.
Holding a constant $1 million in funds at that lower fee would mean about $900 less in annual fund costs, more than twice the $399 annual price of Mezzi Advisory. The dollars depend on how much you invest at the lower fee and which funds you choose.
Understand more of what you own.
Financial advice should help you understand the recommendation, too. The study found signs that investors picked up financial language from Mezzi and brought it into later conversations, including terms such as diversification and allocation. [8]
“I find suggestive evidence that investors thus learn from interacting with generative AI: financial terms used in AI answers are more likely to appear in investors’ subsequent prompts, including in later conversations.”
Explore the researchStudy design, comparison charts and the calculation behind the 15%
What makes this study different?
It follows actual purchases and holdings using Mezzi records. Mezzi shared de-identified records, with personal identifiers removed. The study reports only aggregate results. Gallup–Edward Jones surveyed attitudes toward financial advice. Stanford and MIT researchers simulated the effects of following AI advice. These studies answer different questions.
Mezzi investors chose whether to act. The AI did not execute their trades. [4]
How advice became purchases
Over the study, the share of buy-advice answers followed by a suggested purchase rose from about 6% to about 35%, using approximate endpoints from the paper’s chart. The trend measures follow-through, not trust directly. [5]
By the final observed portfolio date, about 3 in 10 investors held an investment Mezzi had introduced, one they had not named in their question or traded in earlier records. [2]
The numbers behind the 15%
How the portfolios compared
Share of the market’s Sharpe ratio · Higher is better
The study uses the Sharpe ratio, which measures return above a cash benchmark for each unit of risk. Recommended portfolios retained 82.6% of the market’s ratio, versus 71.9% for the alternatives. Dividing 82.6 by 71.9 and subtracting one gives the roughly 15% relative difference. [1]
Two portfolios. The same investor.
What Mezzi recommended
A portfolio built from the investments Mezzi recommended to that person.
What else they bought
A portfolio built from other investments that same person bought after receiving the recommendation.
The researcher compared their returns, how much they fluctuated and their largest declines.
