Investing in a world where everyone knows everything

IN FINANCIAL markets, information has always been the raw material for investing. A generation ago, it was scarce and confined mostly to institutional investors. Research reports arrived by fax; data trickled out slowly; and traders who had faster access to the facts had an edge.

Today, the situation could not be more different. Every investor has real-time prices on their phone, breaking headlines in their pocket and, now, even large language models (LLMs) capable of turning complex financial documents into concise and professional-looking analysis within seconds.

It is tempting to believe that this abundance of insight makes markets more efficient and investors more successful. In practice, it may have created the opposite problem.