Abstract:
Households around the world increasingly take portfolio advice from the same handful of large language models. Does that advice adjust to what local circumstances warrant? I pose the same portfolio problem to leading models across twenty-one countries, each in its own language. Advice is nearly uniform across countries, even though the explanations invoke local context. What moves the advice instead is the model a household consults, not the country it lives in. The models follow retail financial advice rather than what academic finance would prescribe, and fail to incorporate the household's balance sheet even when it is stated. While automated advice once held out the promise of tailoring guidance to everyone, large language models encode the same advice for everyone.
