Ask • Watch it Think • Decide
NovaVest is not just another investment tool. It's an AI-powered Socratic partner designed to refine your investment strategy through thought-provoking conversation and analysis. Instead of giving you direct financial advice, NovaVest challenges your assumptions, helps you uncover blind spots, and guides you to make more informed decisions on your own.
The Socratic method is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presuppositions. NovaVest applies this philosophy to the world of investing.
Our goal is to be the "devil's advocate" for your investment ideas. By asking clarifying questions and presenting alternative viewpoints, NovaVest helps you to:
- Deepen Your Insights: Move beyond surface-level analysis and truly understand the companies and markets you're investing in.
- Challenge Your Assumptions: Identify and question the underlying beliefs that are driving your investment decisions.
- Refine Your Thesis: Strengthen your investment arguments by considering potential risks, alternative outcomes, and different time horizons.
NovaVest is a tool for thought, designed to make you a better, more critical investor.
- Interactive Chat Interface: A seamless, responsive chat interface to engage with your AI investment partner.
- Transparent "Thinking" Process: After a response is generated, you can view the AI's "thought process" in a collapsible section, providing a unique look into how it arrived at its conclusions.
- Streaming Responses: Get real-time feedback and analysis as the AI formulates its thoughts, with a special shimmer effect for the "thinking" parts of the stream.
- Developer-Tool Protection: Basic protection against users opening browser developer tools, to keep the focus on the investment conversation.
NovaVest is the culmination of a carefully planned, end-to-end process that combines data curation, model fine-tuning, and a modern web frontend. Here's a look under the hood:
The heart of NovaVest is its unique dataset, which was curated to teach the AI how to be a Socratic investment advisor. This wasn't about scraping random financial news. Instead, we focused on high-quality, educational content:
- [cite_start]Investor Education: We gathered materials from official investor-education sites like the US SEC's Investor.gov and finance resources like Investopedia to build a foundation of fundamental concepts like risk, diversification, and fundamentals[cite: 109].
- [cite_start]The Wisdom of Value Investors: We incorporated the tone and substance of value investing by scraping shareholder letters from legendary investors like Warren Buffett[cite: 112]. This helped to train the bot's cautious, long-term persona.
- [cite_start]Dialogue-Style Examples: We transformed these materials into a custom dataset of investor-hypothesis prompts paired with probing, analytical responses in a Q&A/dialogue style[cite: 111].
A key goal of NovaVest was to create a powerful AI assistant that could run on minimal hardware. This meant we couldn't just use a massive, off-the-shelf model. Instead, we opted for a more efficient, fine-tuned approach:
- [cite_start]Model Selection: We chose Qwen3-0.6B, a compact Large Language Model (LLM) with only 0.6 billion parameters[cite: 119, 125]. This lightweight model is small enough to run on a 2V CPU without the need for an expensive GPU.
- [cite_start]Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT): We used a technique called LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) to adapt the model to our Socratic investment dataset[cite: 121, 126]. [cite_start]LoRA freezes the base model and trains small "adapter" weights, which dramatically reduces memory and resource requirements[cite: 121]. This allowed us to fine-tune the model on a free Google Colab GPU.
- The Result: A highly specialized, efficient AI model that can provide insightful, Socratic commentary on investment topics, all while running on cost-effective hardware.
The NovaVest frontend is a modern, responsive web application designed to bring the AI's Socratic dialogue to life:
- Tech Stack: We used the Next.js App Router, React, and TypeScript for a robust and type-safe foundation. The UI is built with Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui for a clean, modern aesthetic.
- Streaming and the
<think>Tag: The frontend is designed to handle streaming, chunked UTF-8 responses from the backend. A custom hook,useStreaming, parses the stream and recognizes a special<think>tag. Any text between these tags is rendered with an italic style and a subtle, animated shimmer, giving you a visual cue that the AI is "thinking." - AI Flow Management: We're using Genkit to manage the AI flows, making it easier to orchestrate the interactions between the user, the frontend, and the fine-tuned model.
- AI Model: fine-tuned with LoRA/PEFT
- Frontend:
- Next.js (App Router)
- React
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- shadcn/ui
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Install dependencies:
npm install
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Run the development server:
npm run dev
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Open http://localhost:9002 in your browser to see the application.
One of the most exciting aspects of NovaVest is its performance. By choosing a lightweight model and using parameter-efficient fine-tuning, we've created an AI-powered application that runs on a 2V CPU without the need for a dedicated GPU. This makes NovaVest not only a powerful tool for investors but also a case study in efficient, accessible AI.