Build With Us: Portfolio Update Feature

Welcome to the first installment of Build With Us, a series intended to peel back the curtains and show you some of the new features we’ve been working on! We’ve been listening hard to what users have been saying, and have been working diligently to bring requested features to life!

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A few months ago, one of the student groups we worked with mentioned that as the app stood at that moment, it was difficult to understand exactly how our rebalancing worked. They wanted a clearer picture of how different assets were doing, and why certain changes in portfolio composition would occur. There needed to be better explanations and visibility for the figures that users were seeing in their portfolios.

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Part of the challenge was figuring out a clean but comprehensive way to present the data. With a large number of potential assets to highlight, we had to ensure that the major movers were accessible and understandable without overwhelming the user. Initial attempts were focused on visual solutions, such as charts, graphs, etc. The difficulty was that many of these graphs could not sufficiently capture the dynamic nature of the portfolios. Pie charts could easily represent the proportion of stocks, bonds, alternatives, and cash, but they would not easily portray change over time, nor could they easily display the different sectors included in the portfolio without becoming overly cluttered. Bar graphs would be more appropriate for portraying change over time, but even stacked bar graphs risked becoming cluttered and could not explain why certain changes occurred, either due to rebalancing for risk management or due to market shifts. There were also discussions of heat maps, as our portfolios cover assets across many geographic regions, but such heat maps would not easily encompass other cross-geographic ways of categorizing assets, such as industry or mergers and acquisitions. 

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This student group proposed a feature similar to Spotify Wrapped that would automatically generate a recap of the user’s portfolio activity over the past month, including a series of slides that would portray different aspects of portfolio performance such as overall gains and losses, top movers of the month, comparisons with other benchmarks, and even a recap slide to share with friends on social media. They wanted this update to appear both in users’ inboxes and on the Missions screen in the app once a month: though rebalancing occurs weekly, the team decided that monthly updates would provide an appropriate rhythm that would be sufficiently informative and transparent about portfolio performance without overwhelming users with constant notifications. 

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At first, we were unsure about the feasibility of execution. It would certainly not have been possible to record podcasts for each individual account separately, and even a more general overview of each of the three portfolio types would have been time-consuming. However, when Google released a new version of NotebookLM, their AI-based note-taking tool that helps interact with documents, that made their Audio Overview feature more widely available, it was the perfect tool to use to quickly generate portfolio updates with relevant information by uploading our website, relevant investment data, and news sources. The first attempts to generate these podcasts were on the longer side and somewhat disjointed. With a bit of prompt engineering, we were able to produce a more appropriate result that was shorter in length and contained more relevant information. 

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The result, an AI-generated “conversation” between two voices discussing the portfolio, touched on specific stocks that contributed most to the sample portfolio’s overall gains, as well as some of the stocks that fell and ate away at some of those gains. The update featured specific geographic regions such as Austria, Spain, and Indonesia, as well as specific sectors such as Technology and Consumer Staples. We wanted to highlight the assets that contributed most to the results shown in the portfolio, and thus emphasize the importance of diversification even within regions and sectors. While NotebookLM was unable to produce a podcast under five minutes, despite us including prompts to curtail the length, we manually trimmed the generated podcast to roughly six minutes in length. In the future, we are hoping to include more information about why certain stocks performed well or poorly that month, and to produce similar versions of this podcast for the other types of portfolios we offer. 

Have an idea for something else we can build to enhance the Hush experience? Drop us a line at support@gethush.app or fill out this feedback form!