Soros
AI for geopolitical macro investing
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Hi HN! We are Anshuman and Karén, the co-founders of Lookback Labs and the co-designers of Soros (https://www.asksoros.com/).Soros is a compound AI system built carefully from the ground up to trace a path (multiple paths, really) from a description of a geopolitical event all the way to capital market implications.* Here's how we set it up:Given a description of a given geopolitical event (can be a couple of words; the demo literally has "US-Iran conflict" as the entire string), Soros will - (1) first analyze and perform deep research on it, running scores of searches in parallel to gather deep context that's time-weighted for real events and can serve as background for hypothetical events ("PRC-Taiwan reunification crisis 2027") (2) map out relevant individual actors, factions, organizations, and their propensities, capabilities and salience under a variety of sociopolitical, military, and socioeconomic axes, (3) determine the key resources (or geopolitical chokepoints) whose control is being "negotiated" or fought over, (4) identify the landscape of key decisions that a subset of actors need to take, and the constraints and strategic options they have for each one, (5) generate forward-looking scenarios that incorporate potential paths weaving through each of the key decisions, (6) engage a full-blown Monte Carlo simulation engine and generate thousands of trajectories to estimate relative probabilities of each of the scenarios coming to pass, (7) analyze each scenario to generate likely capital flows and identify the sectors, industries, companies, currencies, and commodities most affected (direction and horizon) (8) identify key search phrases and X/Twitter accounts to track in order to periodically update the analysisThis is obviously a fairly complicated pipeline, with lots of moving components and potential failure points. In order to mitigate the worst aspects of this, we engage the services of Pyrrho (yup, we named it after the Greek philosopher dude), an AI agent that we have set up to be the harshest possible critic of Soros' intermediate and final outputs. Each step above is a delicate dance between Soros and Pyrrho, and this interaction serves to enhance the quality of the final output dramatically.Once you have the analysis setup, you can perform the now-classic "Chat with Analysis" interaction by using the "Ask Soros" functionality. We have a separate chat model hooked up that is (hopefully sufficiently) guard-railed and context-injected enough to focus completely and exclusively on answering freeform questions about the analysis.In the live non-demo system, the user has multiple ways of engaging further with the analysis: they can add new (private) information and do a re-run, they can mark out specific items from associated X/Twitter/search feeds, they can add new actors and resources, modify existing ones, delete some as needed, and basically run simulation after simulation to test out hypotheses (e.g. "What if China entered the conflict? What if France sent its nuclear subs to patrol the Straits of Hormuz?" etc.).You can see the results of all of this, and more, at www.asksoros.com - there is a statically-served demo analysis of the current US-Iran conflict; we urge you to "Take a tour" of the interface to familiarize yourselves with it.(Continuing the post with the first comment below..)
HN · launched Mar 17, 2026 · 26 upvotes (top 22%) · 0 views
Niche: investment and equity research platforms · 226 launches, 13 in the last 7 days ▼ -24% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Fintech
- Analytics & BI
- B2B
- AI-native
- Commercial product
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More like this: all 226 launches in investment and equity research platforms →
Could you build this?
No Developing an accurate compound AI system linking complex geopolitical events to macro capital market impacts requires specialized quantitative finance and macroeconomics domain knowledge, as well as institutional-grade financial data feeds.
What it would actually take: A production implementation requires real-time geopolitical intelligence and global market tick data ingestion pipelines (Bloomberg/Refinitiv feeds, trade route tracking, sanctions databases). The system needs an ensemble of domain-specific causal inference graphs, Bayesian macro models, and LLM reasoning chains calibrated against historical shocks. Building this necessitates quantitative macro researchers, low-latency financial engineering, and access to expensive proprietary datasets.
Discussion
10 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ChatGPT/Claude for scenario analysis, StratFor newsletters, Bloomberg terminals, Prediction markets (Polymarket)
Concerns raised: No formal calibration or accuracy data yet, Difficult to backtest geopolitical forecasting, Unclear if superior to expert predictions or LLMs alone, Risk of trusting unvalidated system for capital allocation
Feature requests: Direct statements from leaders (e.g., Trump) as inputs, Bond and oil market price movement tracking, Automatic background alerts without manual prompting, Pricing strategy for individual investors
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 177 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #38 of 178 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 133 days after the earliest competitor.
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