Every morning before work, I spend about 20 minutes with Claude analyzing A-shares.
I’m not a professional investor. I don’t have a Bloomberg terminal or access to expensive research reports. I’m just an ordinary guy in China who got interested in value investing a few years ago and has been trying to figure it out ever since.
What I do have now is AI — and it’s changed how I approach the market completely.
What A-Shares Are (For International Readers)
A-shares are stocks listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges, priced in Chinese yuan, and until recently mostly accessible only to mainland Chinese investors. If you’re reading this from North America or Europe, you’ve probably never looked at this market seriously.
That’s actually interesting to me — because the Chinese stock market behaves very differently from Western markets. It’s more retail-driven, more volatile, more susceptible to policy announcements, and occasionally produces the kind of dramatic swings that would be front-page news anywhere else but barely register internationally.
I’ve been investing in this market for several years. The results have been mixed. But I’ve learned a lot.
My Morning Routine
Here’s what my actual process looks like:
I start by pulling up the financial data on whatever company I’m researching — revenue trends, profit margins, debt levels, cash flow. This is publicly available information in China, just time-consuming to dig through.
Then I paste the key numbers into Claude and ask it to help me think through what they mean. I’ll ask things like: “This company’s gross margin has dropped from 35% to 28% over three years — what are the most likely explanations?” or “How does this debt-to-equity ratio compare to typical figures for this industry?”
Claude doesn’t give me stock picks. I don’t ask it to. What it does is help me think more clearly — identifying things I might have missed, asking questions I hadn’t considered, explaining financial concepts in plain language when I need a refresher.
What AI Actually Changes
Before I started using Claude this way, my research process was slower and more scattered. I’d spend time on things that weren’t really adding value — formatting data, looking up definitions, second-guessing my own reasoning.
Now the bottleneck is the thinking itself, which is where it should be.
One thing that surprised me: Claude is genuinely good at helping with the qualitative side of analysis. Competitive dynamics, management behavior patterns, industry structure — these things are harder to quantify but often more important than the numbers. Having something to think out loud with makes a real difference.
The Limitations I’ve Learned
AI doesn’t know things that aren’t public. It can’t tell me what a company’s management is actually thinking, or predict how the government will respond to a sector-specific policy change. In China especially, policy risk is real and hard to model.
It also can’t replace judgment. There have been times when Claude’s analysis of a situation was technically correct but missed the cultural or political context that would have been obvious to anyone who’d spent time following Chinese business news. I’ve learned to treat AI output as a starting point for thinking, not a conclusion.
And of course, it can be wrong. Not often in obvious ways — more often in subtle ways that require you to already know enough to catch the error. This is probably the most important limitation: AI is most useful when you already have enough knowledge to evaluate what it’s telling you.
Why I’m Writing About This
Most content about AI and investing focuses on Western markets — US stocks, crypto, ETFs. There’s almost nothing written in English about using AI to analyze Chinese equities from the perspective of someone actually inside the market.
I find that gap interesting. The Chinese stock market is the second largest in the world. Hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese people participate in it. And yet the English-language conversation about it is almost entirely from the outside looking in.
I’m on the inside. And I’m going to keep writing about what I see.
Are you curious about the Chinese stock market? Or do you use AI for investing in any market? I’d love to hear how other ordinary investors are approaching this.