Peter Cunningham Says AI Is Improving Wealth Management

Artificial intelligence is transforming how ordinary investors interact with Wall Street, but veteran wealth manager Peter Cunningham doesn't believe it is making experienced financial professionals obsolete.

If anything, he believes it's making conversations with clients better.

Cunningham, a wealth manager at Siebert Financial, has spent more than 35 years on Wall Street after entering the industry in 1991. Over that period, he has worked through dramatically different economic environments while advising individuals, corporations and families on investments and wealth management.

Today, tools including ChatGPT and Claude are creating another shift: Investors can research markets, analyze financial concepts and arrive at meetings armed with information that once largely lived inside the financial industry.

For Cunningham, that creates an opportunity.

"Clients are coming in more educated," Cunningham says of the broader technological shift.

Rather than simply delivering information, the modern wealth manager increasingly needs to translate it, validate it and put it into the context of a client's actual finances.

Thirty-Five Years of Market Cycles

Cunningham's investment philosophy was shaped long before generative AI existed.

Having worked on Wall Street through numerous market disruptions and recoveries, he believes investors can hurt themselves by becoming overly focused on predicting the market's next move.

His philosophy instead emphasizes time in the market.

The appropriate portfolio, however, changes substantially depending on the investor.

Someone early in a career can generally afford to accept greater volatility and maintain heavier exposure to equities, ETFs and individual companies. In middle age, Cunningham says a portfolio might transition toward something resembling a 60/40 mix of equities and fixed income, potentially incorporating municipal bonds depending on the investor's circumstances.

By someone's 70s or 80s, wealth preservation and reliable income can become far more important, potentially resulting in portfolios heavily weighted toward fixed income.

The common thread is that investment strategy should evolve alongside the person.

Wealth Management Goes Beyond Picking Stocks

That distinction is central to how Cunningham describes his work.

Managing wealth can involve investments, but it can also mean understanding a client's business, estate considerations and tax situation while coordinating with accountants and other professional advisors.

Cunningham sees the role as being both a custodian and steward of a client's financial life.

He also believes successful wealth creation begins before portfolio allocation enters the conversation.

One budgeting framework Cunningham favors is allocating roughly one-third of available money to investing, one-third to savings and one-third to spending. While individual circumstances differ, the broader point is preventing lifestyle expenses from consuming virtually every additional dollar someone earns.

A professional earning $120,000 annually, for example, could potentially direct $2,500 to $3,000 each month toward savings and investments rather than allowing larger housing and lifestyle expenses to absorb the additional income.

Over decades, Cunningham argues, that discipline can matter enormously because of compounding.

Technology may make financial information easier to access than at any point during Cunningham's 35 years on Wall Street.

But his approach remains decidedly old school: save consistently, remain invested, understand your risk and build a financial strategy around decades rather than days.