StockBabble: A Conversational Financial Agent to support Stock Market Investors

TL;DR

StockBabble is a conversational agent designed to assist retail investors by providing stock information, news, charts, and portfolio management features, thereby enhancing their confidence and engagement with the stock market.

Contribution

This paper introduces StockBabble, a novel conversational financial agent that supports retail investors with real-time data, news, and portfolio tools, and evaluates its effectiveness through user studies.

Findings

73% of users felt more confident in investing after using StockBabble

All participants would recommend the agent to others

The agent effectively supports informational and engagement needs of retail investors

Abstract

We introduce StockBabble, a conversational agent designed to support understanding and engagement with the stock market. StockBabble's value and novelty is in its ability to empower retail investors -- many of which may be new to investing -- and supplement their informational needs using a user-friendly agent. Users have the ability to query information on companies to retrieve a general and financial overview of a stock, including accessing the latest news and trading recommendations. They can also request charts which contain live prices and technical investment indicators, and add shares to a personal portfolio to allow performance monitoring over time. To evaluate our agent's potential, we conducted a user study with 15 participants. In total, 73% (11/15) of respondents said that they felt more confident in investing after using StockBabble, and all 15 would consider recommending it to others. These results are encouraging and suggest a wider appeal for such agents. Moreover, we believe this research can help to inform the design and development of future intelligent, financial personal assistants.