How-to · due diligence

How to research stocks with AI — with citations

Asking a bare chatbot “is NVDA a buy?” gets you a confident essay with no sources and stale numbers. Real due diligence needs three modes — the filings, the crowd, and the open web — each cited so you can check the claim. This guide wires all three into one agent session: SEC EDGAR for the documents, X (Grok) and Reddit for sentiment, Perplexity and Firecrawl for deep research, and a local journal so the work compounds.

Step 1 — Setup (once)

curl -fsSL https://tradeloop.top/install.sh | sh
tradeloop login
tradeloop setup

The free tier includes monthly Perplexity and Firecrawl research quotas through TradeLoop's gateway — no per-provider accounts or API keys to register. EDGAR and market data work out of the box.

Step 2 — Ground the numbers first

Pull NVDA's current quote, 14-day RSI, next earnings date,
and the most recent 10-Q. Summarize what changed vs the
prior quarter — revenue, margins, guidance.

The agent hits the market-data tools for price and momentum, then SEC EDGAR for the filing itself. Numbers come from the primary source — a filing on file with the SEC — not from whatever the model remembers.

Step 3 — Read the crowd, with receipts

What are FinTwit and Reddit saying about NVDA this week?
Weigh bullish vs bearish, note if one loud account is
skewing it, and cite the actual posts.

The agent fans out X Search (Grok's live search over X, where FinTwit lives) and Reddit Search across r/wallstreetbets, r/stocks, and r/options, dedupes cross-posts, and returns a read with post URLs. Sentiment is attention, not truth — the citations let you judge the sample yourself.

Step 4 — Build the case with cited web research

Build the bull case and the bear case for NVDA over the
next two quarters. Use web research with sources — I want
to click through to every claim.

Perplexity synthesizes across many sources and returns citations; Firecrawl extracts specific pages — an investor-relations deck, a competitor announcement — as clean markdown the agent can quote precisely. Ask for both sides explicitly; an agent told to build the bear case will find the risks a “summarize the outlook” prompt glosses over.

Step 5 — File it, so the work compounds

File this as a thesis in my journal — the summary, both
cases, the sentiment read, and links to every source.

The agent writes the thesis into your local TradeLoop Wiki — plain markdown with git history, Obsidian-compatible, free at every tier. Next week, “what's changed on my NVDA thesis since I wrote it?” starts from your own filed research instead of from scratch.

Keep the discipline

• Filings beat chatter. When a Reddit claim contradicts the 10-Q, the 10-Q wins. Ask the agent to label each claim: filing, official data, or social read.
• No verdict without evidence. The tools return sources; make the agent cite them. An uncited “the market expects…” is a guess wearing a suit.
• The decision is yours. This workflow produces a researched picture, not a trade call.

Going further

Once the thesis is filed, set alert conditions on the name so the agent pings you when the setup you researched actually triggers — and start each session with live quotes instead of stale numbers.

Related skills: Perplexity · X Search · SEC EDGAR · TradeLoop Wiki. Deep dives: FinTwit & Reddit Sentiment Tracking and Your Trading Journal as Durable Agent Memory.