Blog
Updates and notes on overseas investing from the Opula team.
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Earning $300 more and spending $300 less are not the same $300
Raising your assumed return from 7% to 10% pulls retirement forward by 1.8 years. Cutting monthly spending by $300 pulls it forward by exactly the same 1.8 years. Earning $300 more buys you only 0.7. Spending is the one input that moves both your savings and your target, and here is that difference in real numbers.
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Deploying your MCP server does not update its tool descriptions
We fixed one line in a tool description, deployed, and nothing changed. Reading the spec explained why. Shipping the server and updating the contract the client holds are two different things, and for `instructions` there is no update path defined at all. Here is the incident it caused, and why we moved our contracts out of prose and into the response path.
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Tracking stocks across multiple brokerage accounts in one place
Why merging balances from three brokers ends in a hand-built spreadsheet, where that spreadsheet quietly breaks, and what it takes to get currency, overlap, and real concentration right.
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Tesla posted record deliveries and fell 14%. What broke was not demand, it was earnings.
A dated timeline of what actually happened to Tesla in July 2026, and three judgments about how to read it. Deliveries hit a record, operating margin collapsed to 1.4%, and the trailing P/E sits at 295x. Reading that combination as simply overvalued gets you halfway.
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The S&P 500 fell 18% in 2022. For a Korean investor it fell 13%.
Buy a US stock from outside the US and you hold two positions: the stock, and the dollar. In 2022 the currency leg cushioned a Korean investor by five percentage points. In 2025 it took two and a half back. Here is why tools that report only in USD hide the second position entirely.
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Why I won't let AI make my investment decisions, and what I built instead
I set out to build an AI investing agent and arrived at the opposite conclusion. Investment decisions are bets on the future, LLMs are reasoners over present information, and the mismatch is structural. How the trap quants have known for decades repeats in AI agents under worse conditions, and what AI is actually good at in investing right now.
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A Kubera alternative, for the question Kubera doesn't answer
Kubera may be the best pure net-worth dashboard you can buy. But most people searching for an alternative want one of two different things, a lower price or actual analysis, and those lead to very different answers.
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Up 50%, then down 50%, and you have lost a quarter of your money
The average of +50% and -50% is zero, and your account is down 25%. Why arithmetic average returns overstate what you actually earn, what volatility drag costs in real numbers, and why any projection that asks only for a return is lying by omission.
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Three ETFs feel diversified. They can be one bet on the same ten stocks.
VOO plus QQQ plus a little direct Apple is not three positions. How to do the look-through math on what you actually own, why per-ticker views fail in both directions, and where the honest number comes from.
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Claude can research stocks. It cannot tell you how your portfolio is doing.
Claude with web search already answers most market questions. The gap is not market knowledge, it is your own state: your positions, your cost basis, your history, and numbers that do not change between two asks.
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Is it safe to connect your finances to an AI assistant?
Connecting your holdings to an AI assistant through an MCP connector means handing a hosted service your financial data. Here is the risk model, the questions to ask any connector, and exactly where Opula lands on each.
Announcement
Opula Pro is now free for 14 days, all of it
Every Pro analysis tool, free for 14 days, with no card on file. One trial per account, and that's the only condition.
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ChatGPT now connects to your bank. Here's what it still can't do.
OpenAI launched Plaid-powered account connections in ChatGPT in May 2026. It is a real step forward, and it still misses non-US and alternative assets, forward projections, and can get numbers wrong.
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Opula vs Era vs Truthifi: which MCP wealth connector fits you
A head-to-head of three finance MCP connectors. Truthifi audits your investments, Era automates your cash flow, and Opula tracks alternative assets and projects your net worth forward.
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Best MCP servers for personal finance (2026)
A balanced guide to the finance MCP connectors that plug your money into Claude and ChatGPT: Truthifi, Era, Monarch, Muntze, and Opula, and which one fits which job.
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Using Claude to track and analyze your net worth with MCP
What it means to connect your finances to Claude through an MCP connector, the difference between read-only sync and real analysis, and how to pick one.
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How to run a FIRE projection on your actual portfolio, not a generic calculator
Why single-number FIRE calculators mislead, what a Monte Carlo projection shows instead, and how to run one on your real holdings and savings rate.
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How to track assets no app can sync: Korean gold, jeonse deposits, private holdings
Automatic aggregators skip physical gold, jeonse deposits, and private holdings. Here is how to keep them in your net worth instead of pretending they are not there.