How to build a personalized crypto portfolio tracker using ChatGPT

Key takeaways

• AI tools like ChatGPT can help both experienced and new crypto investors track portfolios with ease, freeing up time for other investment activities and making the process more accessible.

• Defining specific requirements, such as which cryptocurrencies to track and the desired data points, is essential for building an effective portfolio tracker tailored to your investment goals.

• By combining ChatGPT with real-time crypto data from APIs like CoinMarketCap, you can generate valuable market commentary and analysis, providing deeper insights into your portfolio performance.Developing additional features like price alerts, performance analysis and a user-friendly interface can make your tracker more functional, helping you stay ahead of market trends and manage your crypto investments more effectively.

If you’re a cryptocurrency investor, you’ve clearly got a strong appetite for risk! Cryptocurrency portfolios involve many immersive stages, from desktop research on the profitability of cryptocurrencies to actively trading crypto to monitoring regulations. Managing a portfolio of cryptocurrencies can be complex and time-consuming, even for savvy investors. 

Conversely, if you’re a newbie in the world of cryptocurrencies and want to set yourself up for success, you may be put off by the complexity of it all. 

The good news is that artificial intelligence (AI) offers valuable tools for the crypto industry, helping you simplify portfolio tracking and analysis when applied effectively. 

As an experienced crypto investor, this can help free up your valuable time to focus on other activities in your investment lifecycle. If you’re a new investor, AI can help you take that all-important first step. Read on to see how AI, and specifically, ChatGPT, can help you build a customized portfolio tracker.

To begin with, what is it? 

Let’s find out.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a conversational AI model that can deliver various tasks using user-defined prompts — including data retrieval, analysis and visualizations. 

The GPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” which references the fact that it is a large language model extensively trained on copious amounts of text from diverse sources across the internet and designed to understand context and deliver actionable results for end-users. 

The intelligence of ChatGPT makes it a powerful resource for building a crypto portfolio tracker specifically geared toward your investment profile and objectives.

Let’s learn how to build a custom portfolio tracker with ChatGPT.

Step 1: Define your requirements

Technical specifics notwithstanding, it is crucial to first define what you expect from your crypto portfolio tracker. For example, consider the following questions:

• What cryptocurrencies will you track? 

• What is your investment approach? Are you looking to actively day trade cryptocurrencies or are you looking to “buy and hold” them for the long term?

• What are the data points you need to compile for the tracker? These may include but are not limited to price, market cap, volume and even news summaries from the web that could materially alter your investment decisions.

• What exactly do you need the tracker to deliver for you? Real-time updates? Periodic summaries? Perhaps a combination of both?

• What do you want the output to look like? Alerts, performance analysis, historical data or something else?

Once you have a clear understanding of your requirements, you can move on to the next steps. It is best practice to write down your requirements in a consolidated specifications document so you can keep refining them later if required.

Step 2: Set up a ChatGPT instance

This is the fun bit! Well, it is if you enjoy geeking out on code. Remember that ChatGPT is a large language model with a vast amount of intelligence sitting underneath it. 

Using ChatGPT effectively therefore requires you to be able to access the underlying model, which you can do via an Application Program Interface, or API. 

The company that owns ChatGPT — OpenAI — provides API access to the tool you can utilize to build your tracker. It’s simpler than you might think. You can use a basic three-step process to set up your own ChatGPT instance:

1. Navigate to OpenAI and sign up for an API key.

2. Set up an environment to make API calls. Python is an ideal choice for this, but there are alternatives, such as Node.js.

3. Write a basic script to communicate with ChatGPT using the API key. Here’s a Pythonic script that you may find useful for incorporating OpenAI capabilities into Python. (Note that this is only intended as a representative example to explain OpenAI integration and not to be viewed as financial advice.)

Step 3: Integrate a cryptocurrency data source

With your ChatGPT instance set up, it is time to complete the other part of the puzzle, namely, your cryptocurrency data source. There are many places to look, and several APIs can help with the information required for this step. 

Examples…