Future of Publics
Since the mods nuked the perplexity thread, wanted to start a separate thread discussing future trajectory of this industry and AI. ie what you're noticing in new juniors, emerging alpha pockets, overall work quality, etc.
Basically an open forum on everything that was taken down.
Bump
What did the perplexity thread say?
It was a series of pitches over Zoom by a bunch of college kids that were bad/missing detail (in part due to them being limited to using Perplexity as a marketing stunt), made humorous by multiple founders/legends from top funds (Silver Lake, Appaloosa, Coatue, etc.) visibly cringing/looking exasperated while listening to them.
Ah, yeah I read about that competition and wondered how it would go. I think people are missing the point on AI in publics.
AI does not turn bad investors into good investors. It just nukes the cost of acquiring and processing information. The Grossman Stiglitz paradox says that in equilibrium active investors earn a small premium over their research costs, or nobody would bother doing the work and prices would not reflect information.
If AI makes research much cheaper, you no longer need a huge, high fee active industry to keep markets roughly efficient. A smaller, cheaper set of AI enabled active shops can handle price discovery, and the fee pool for old school stock pickers shrinks. The worry is that alpha becomes even harder to deliver consistently, because informational edges get competed away faster. Not new, just accelerates and reinforces the headwinds active has been seeing for decades.
How much informational edge even exists at this point? Think there are other pockets of alpha better worth pursuing
Gotta skirt that black edge son
I never really understood the concept of information or data edge and why people are so obsessed with this. Real edge comes from insights, which are never derived from one source (i.e., some random data pull, channel checks, expert interviews, etc.). AI will enhance the ability to generate insights faster maybe, but it isn't going to generate insights for you. Insight come from years and years of pattern recognition, following industries, reading, studying management teams, and then the goal is to take that cumulative insight and deploy it decisively and in a meaningful way when you find an opportunity.
Point taken on information or data edge. But doesn’t generating insights faster and more cheaply also drive market efficiency? In other words even if AI doesn’t generate the insights itself, I think it’s this accelerating market efficiency that’s the concern. I mean large cap is already v hard to generate alpha in; can imagine this spreading/accelerating SMID.
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