Mastering AI is a new gold rush… but how can it make you a better investor? [Wednesday: The Independent Investor]
Miles Everson’s The Business Builder Daily speaks to the heart of what great marketers, business leaders, and other professionals need to succeed in advertising, communications, managing their investments, career strategy, and more.
A Note from Miles Everson:
Hello, everyone!
Happy Wednesday and welcome to “The Independent Investor!”
We’re thrilled to share with you an interesting investing insight today. In these articles, we focus on ways to help you boost your finances and investment portfolios.
For now, let’s talk about a coaching comment Professor Joel Litman delivered to his workforce at Valens Research in June 2023.
Keep reading below to know the importance of using the RIGHT tools in your investment strategies.
Miles Everson
CEO, MBO Partners
Chairman of the Advisory Board, The I Institute
The Independent Investor
Are you familiar with Lotus 1-2-3?
For those of you who aren’t, Lotus 1-2-3 was a spreadsheet program from Lotus Software. The spreadsheet was the first killer application of the IBM PC and was HUGELY popular in the 1980s.
In fact, this application significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles in the business world! Many people used Lotus 1-2-3 for the simplest, most mundane of tasks such as building and tracking financial statements.
… but did you know that prior to Lotus 1-2-3, professionals in the field of accounting only used spreadsheet paper?
According to Robert Spivey, Director of Research at Valens Research, when his mom first started in accounting, she would use spreadsheet paper to manually calculate various financial statements.
Just imagine the amount of time, effort, and brain power it took to do that!
That’s why when Lotus 1-2-3 came out, lots of people immediately started thinking of ways they could use it, speed up the building of complex models, and automatically calculate and recalculate financial statements.
Those who pushed the software to its limit were able to save a lot of time.
Photo from The Register
According to Spivey, the scramble to master AI nowadays feels like a new gold rush. The logic that was true for Lotus 1-2-3 and the technology before it is the same logic that is true for tools like AI today.
In fact, Spivey and his team declared 2023 as “The Year of AI.”
Think about it: AI mania has taken over the stock market nowadays. Every time you open social media or any news platform, you probably see millions of news or articles about how ChatGPT or some other AI tool can boost your productivity.
That’s true—AI helps people do more in a short period of time. However, there’s a problem: Most people are looking at AI the WRONG way and not taking FULL advantage of the opportunities this technology offers.
… and so today, we’ll look at some ways AI can actually help you become a BETTER investor.
“The Year of Artificial Intelligence (AI)”
Spivey says a lot of “revolutionary” technologies fall flat when they’re actually used. He states people simply love to tout ways to implement the hottest new tech, claiming what they’re doing is unprecedented.
In reality, what they’re claiming is mundane…
Examples:
“Here’s how AI can build a course program for learning a foreign language!”
“Here’s how AI can give you a program to improve search-engine optimization for your business!”
Admit it. These ideas may sound different from anything you’ve ever encountered… but they’re not. It’s like assuming the sum total of AI is just using ChatGPT as an executive assistant.
According to Spivey, if AI is a hammer, all these people are doing is banging away at nails.
It’s easy to fall into this trap, especially when AI is all you see or work with every day. That’s why Spivey and his team have challenged themselves to take a different approach.
Their goal is to use AI to become something of an “analyst in a box.” They’re using the tool to analyze their most successful ideas, the ones they got wrong, and the ones they missed out on.
Spivey and his team are also trying out tools like Hila.ai to summarize their own content and presentations in bite-sized pieces. They create prompts and queries to frame how the AI tool should explain various businesses, and use those frameworks to ask questions the right way.
The bottom line?
Almost any research can be accelerated with the RIGHT tools!
So, don’t fall into the trap of using AI as a simple “lesson planner” or executive assistant, even though it may be incredibly robust in such roles.
If you want to properly and effectively use AI in your research, don’t ask it to simply “build me a framework for analyzing companies.”
Instead, ask specific questions about companies like Google’s parent, Alphabet (GOOGL). Instruct the AI to “break down the segments of Alphabet’s business for me and explain the competitive advantages of each. Organize them from the segment with the most profit to the least.”
Afterwards, ask follow-up questions about the segments broken down for you. If the AI explains that Google Services is the largest segment, ask a question like, “What are the competitive advantages that make Google Services so successful, and what are the biggest risks to this business?”
While some of you may be able to answer such questions about Alphabet yourself, there are plenty of companies you can’t do that for unless you use AI to your advantage.
We hope you learned something new from today’s topic!
Think of AI as your research assistant. You’ll see, it can do a lot of the legwork for you to help you learn about the most important aspects of various companies.
(This article is from The Business Builder Daily, a newsletter by The I Institute in collaboration with MBO Partners.)
About The Dynamic Marketing Communiqué’s
“Wednesdays: The Independent Investor”
To best understand a firm, it makes sense to know its underlying earning power.
In two of the greatest books ever written on investing, the “Intelligent Investor” by Benjamin Graham and “Security Analysis” by David Dodd and Benjamin Graham (yes, Graham authored both of these books), the term “earning power” is mentioned hundreds of times.
LITERALLY.
Despite that, it’s surprising how earning power is mentioned seldomly in literature on business strategy. If the goal of a business is wealth creation, then the performance metrics must include the earning power concept.
Every Wednesday, we’ll publish investing tips and insights in accordance with the practices of some of the world’s greatest investors.
We make certain that these articles help you identify and separate the best companies from the worst, and develop your investing prowess in the long run.
Our goal?
To help you get on that path towards the greatest value creation in investing.
Hope you’ve found this week’s insights interesting and helpful.
Stay tuned for next Wednesday’s “The Independent Investor!”
Cheers,
Kyle Yu
Head of Marketing
Valens Dynamic Marketing Capabilities
Powered by Valens Research
www.valens-research.com
