Claude 101 for Investing (2/4)
Let's talk about Projects in Claude, so you never have to explain yourself twice.
Teach Claude Your Investment Context
Let's talk about Projects, so you never explain yourself twice. Most people retype the same background at the start of every chat, then wonder why the answers still feel generic. This is the fix, and it takes about 15 minutes.
This is the second of 4 setup guides. Part 1 covered which feature each job belongs in. The one thing you need from it here: a Project is where anything you come back to repeatedly lives. Start here or start anywhere, each part works on its own. Parts 3 and 4 are linked here as they get published.
- 01Set Up Claude for Investing
- 02Teach Claude Your Investment Context
- 03Create Your Own Stock Analysis with Claude
- 04Turn Claude's Answers Into Documents You Keep
The 4 core sections, in order. Nothing here needs any prior knowledge of Claude.
- 02What a Project actually is2 halves, one definition, and the setting most people fill in wrongly.
- 03Memory is not the same thingThere is a wall between the two, it is deliberate, and it surprises everyone.
- 04The 4 ways investors use a Project4 types, then one built start to finish so you have something to copy.
- 05The trap: stale contextOld files answer with exactly the same confidence as new ones.
Why context is the whole game
Here is the thing nobody tells beginners. The gap between a thin answer and a useful one usually has nothing to do with how you phrased the question.
Same question, twice. Once in a fresh chat that knows nothing about you, and once inside a Project that already holds your notes and the company's last 2 sets of results.
- Asks which company you mean
- Explains what margins are, which you did not ask for
- Gives you the general reasons margins move in any business
- Cannot tell you what changed, because it has nothing to compare
- Knows which company, because that is what the Project is for
- Compares the wording in the last 2 statements it holds, with page references
- Separates what actually moved from what was only described differently
- Tells you your own note said you would watch this, and whether it is now answered
Nothing about the question improved. The second version had something to work with, and that is the entire difference. What follows is how you build the second one.
What a Project actually is
A Project is a workspace that holds your instructions and your files, and applies both to every chat you start inside it.
That is the whole definition. You will find it in the left-hand menu, and on a free account you can have 5 of them, which is more than most people need.
Open one and you see 3 panels: Instructions, Memory and Context. Memory fills itself in as you go, and section 3 covers why you should not lean on it. The other 2 are the ones you write, and they behave differently, so it is worth being precise about which is which.
A block of text you write once. It loads at the start of every chat you open inside the Project, so it is where your standing preferences live: who you are, what this Project is for, what you already think, and how you want to be answered.
This is the half people leave empty, and it is the half that changes the answers most.
Documents you add under Context in the Project. Annual reports, results statements, transcripts, your own notes. They stay available in every chat inside the Project, rather than being attached to one conversation and then lost.
Files are the easy half. Most people do this bit and stop.
Instructions, Memory and Context. The instructions and the files under Context are the 2 halves you control.
When you create a Project you are asked for a name and a description. Neither of them is visible to Claude. They are labels for you, so you can find the right Project in a list.
People write "Project for tracking [COMPANY], focus on margins and debt" in the description, assume that has set the context, and then wonder why the answers are generic. It has to go in the instructions field to do anything.
The name and the description sit at the top of the Project. Useful for you, invisible to Claude.
Memory is not the same thing
Claude has a feature actually called Memory, and it is separate from what a Project holds. Confusing the two is the most common early frustration, so it is worth 2 minutes now.
Memory is Claude writing short entries about you as you chat, so it picks up your role, what you work on and how you like to be answered. You will find it in Settings, under Memory. The toggle is called Generate memory from chat history, and the line underneath it is the one that matters: it controls memory for both chats and Projects. The separate toggle above it, Search and reference chats, is what lets Claude look back through past conversations, and that one needs a paid plan.
Settings, then Memory. One toggle covers both ordinary chats and Projects.
Here is the part that catches people. One toggle, but every Project gets its own separate memory space, walled off from your ordinary chats and from every other Project. Open a Project you have not used much and its Memory panel tells you as much: it will fill up after a few chats, which means it starts empty. So you can explain something at length in an ordinary chat, open your Project, and find it has never heard of it.
Anthropic describes the separation as deliberate: it keeps the context inside each Project focused, and stops one piece of work bleeding into another. For investing that is exactly what you want. A Project on one company should not be quietly reasoning from what you said about a different one.
2 things worth knowing. When you search past chats from inside a Project, it only searches that Project. And if you ever reset memory, it deletes Project memories too, and that cannot be undone.
Memory fills itself up as you go. You can tell it to remember something directly, but beyond that you do not choose what goes in or when.
So do not build on it. If you need Claude to know something reliably, it goes in the instructions or into a file under Context. Not in a message you sent it once. Anything you only said in passing should be treated as gone.