I ran the same finance research task across Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude. The takeaway was not that one tool wins. It was that each one is good at a different stage, and the mistake is asking one tool to do all of it.
How I split the job:
1. Find and source (Perplexity): pull recent facts with a live citation, use it to locate the filing or release, then open the primary source yourself. 2. Structure (ChatGPT): paste in the messy notes and have it organize them into a comps table or a question list. It shapes what you gathered, it is not your fact source. 3. Long documents (Claude): feed it the full 10-K or transcript, ask for one section at a time with the page noted, then draft the first pass of the memo.
The common mistake is trusting whichever tool you opened first to also be correct. The failure mode is a confident answer with no source that quietly becomes an assumption in your model. The discipline: every figure gets a source, a page, and a date, or it gets cut.
The tool drafts and extracts. You verify and decide.
Save this one and run it on your next name.
Educational content only. Not investment advice, and not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. Wall Street Prompt. Always verify against the primary source.