Claude 101 for Investing (1/4)
Which feature does which job, which model to pick, and the small additions to a prompt that fix most bad answers.
Set Up Claude for Investing
Which feature does which job, which model to pick, and the small additions to a prompt that fix most bad answers. Most people run every investing question through one long chat, then wonder why the answers feel thin.
This is the first of 4 setup guides. Start here or start anywhere, each part works on its own. Parts 2 to 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 5 core sections, in order. Nothing here needs any prior knowledge of Claude.
- 02Free vs paid planWhat you can do without paying, and what you actually need to pay for.
- 03The 5 main featuresWhat each one does, and what it looks like on screen so you can find it.
- 04Investing use cases per feature9 investing jobs across Chat, Cowork and Design, each with an example.
- 05Picking your modelEvery model compared: what it is good at, what it costs you, when to use it.
- 06Simple tips for better prompts7 small additions that fix Claude's most common weaknesses.
The problem is not the model, it is the setup
You asked Claude about a company and got something vague. Or a number that turned out to be months old. Or 4 paragraphs of prose when you wanted one figure.
Almost always, that is not the model being weak. It is the job being in the wrong place, with the wrong information to hand.
Almost everyone starts the same way. One chat window, open for weeks, holding a jumble of half-finished questions about 6 different companies. It works for a while. Then it quietly stops working, because a long chat that has drifted across 6 topics gives worse answers than a fresh one with the right information in it.
The fix is not a cleverer prompt. It is knowing which of the 5 features to use, which model to pick, and what to add to the question. That is the whole report.
Free vs paid plan
Start here, because there is no point learning a feature you cannot open. 2 of the 5 need a paid Anthropic plan. The other 3 do not.
| Feature | Plan needed | Where you find it |
|---|---|---|
| Chat | Free | Browser, desktop app, phone |
| Projects | Free, up to 5 | Browser, desktop app, phone |
| Files | Free | Inside any chat |
| Cowork | Paid plan | Browser, desktop app, phone. Desktop app open if it needs files on your own computer |
| Design | Paid plan | Browser, desktop app |
3 signals, and wanting to try Cowork is not one of them.
1. You are hitting usage limits partway through a task, more than once a week. That is the plan telling you.
2. You want to hand over whole jobs rather than answer questions one at a time. That is Cowork, and it is the strongest single reason to pay.
3. You need more than 5 Projects, which usually means you are following more than 4 or 5 things closely.
Until one of those is true, the free plan does everything in this report apart from Cowork and Design. Start there and let the limit tell you when to move.
The 5 main features
These are not 5 alternatives you pick between. They stack. There is one real decision, then 2 things you can bolt on to either side of it, and Design, which works differently from the rest.
Every piece of work starts here. Are you asking a question, or handing over a job?
A single conversation. You type, it replies, you read, you type again. You stay in the loop at every step, which is what you want when you are thinking something through rather than delegating it. Best used one topic at a time.
The Chat and Cowork switch sits in the composer. Chat is the default.
You describe an outcome and step away. Claude works through something with several stages and comes back when it is finished, instead of answering one message at a time. Needs a paid plan.
This is also where Claude's finance plugins earn their keep. Anthropic's marketplace holds more than 20 of them and 4 are genuinely built for retail investors. 2 run as agents you trigger and leave alone, which is exactly this kind of work. The other 2 are command bundles you fire inside a chat instead. I went through all 4, including the ones worth skipping, in What Claude's New Finance Agents Actually Do.
Same composer, other side of the switch. Cowork adds a project or folder to work in.
Neither of these replaces the choice you just made. They sit on top of it, and they are what turns a one-off answer into something you can keep.
A container that holds your instructions and your files, and keeps them across every chat or session you start inside it. Set one up for a company, a theme, or your own idea log, and you stop starting from nothing each time. The free plan gives you 5, which is more than most people need.
A Project is a name plus instructions. Part 2 of this series covers what to write here.
Attach a document for Claude to read, and get a working file back: a spreadsheet, a table, a cleaned-up export. Drop one into a chat for a single question, or add it to a Project so it is there every time. If what you want at the end is a file rather than words, this is the part doing it.
Files added to a Project stay available in every chat inside it. You can also attach one directly in a chat.
The other 4 are all about getting to an answer. Design is about what that answer looks like when you want to come back to it: a chart, a one page view of a company, something you glance at next quarter rather than read once and lose. Needs a paid plan.
Claude Design opens on its own screen, with templates for the kind of thing you want.