Many decades ago, technology was limited, and information asymmetry could be more effectively arbitraged to achieve outperformance.

Let’s imagine a relatively unknown company whose market capitalization was trading below book value. Their financial data was shoved toward the back of a Moody’s Manual in the days before the internet. Only those who would be willing to put in the work could find these hidden gems and take advantage of these relatively unknown opportunities.

But today, things are different.

We all should have no difficulty finding company data, equity analysis, and public filings offering us insights into the corporations we entrust with our capital.

Here’s the evidence:

1. I can use public stock screeners to isolate a “Quality Compounder” trading at a significant haircut from a 52-week high, potentially screening for undervalued opportunities that align with my investment philosophy.
2. Without even signing up for an account, I am able to access 15 years of financial data on a business on Roic.AI.
3. I can research most public information on a business directly from the corporation itself. Most companies publish investor relations pages on their website, with troves of documents such as 10-Ks, 10-Qs, Schedule 14-As, and much more.
4. If I wanted opinion pieces on Copart, Substack offers a Vault of high-quality investment writeups from excellent creators such as Rijnberk InvestInsights, Lucas | Summit Stocks, and Margin Valley Research.

…And I could go on and on.

The takeaway: information is no longer scarce.

AI Supercharges The Investment Process

So we have the information, great. But we still have to digest it all, right? …right?

Not so fast.

Not only do we have access to it, but analyzing it is now much more time-efficient.

Many investors, myself included, have begun to use large language models such as Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT to summarize, explain, and digest financial information on investment opportunities. So what does this allow us to do?

• An investor can turn lengthy documents to digestible summaries in seconds
• Extraneous context can be pulled and presented that you would not have otherwise known
• You can analyze business models without having to spend hours outlining it yourself.

Of course, one must be careful of LLM “hallucinations” and false reporting.

But truthfully, the invention of artificial intelligence has made the lives of investors much simpler. AI has become a research accelerator.

Here’s a personal anecdote:

At heart, I am a long-term investor. When deciding which investments to make, I perform lengthy research on each potential opportunity. In this process, I carve out time to understand the business model, customer cohorts, pricing power, and contextual nuances that drive long-term sustainability of the businesses.

I ran into an interesting business the other week by the name of Badger Meter ($BMI). Here’s my first question I always ask:

[!IMPORTANT] What does the business do, how does it make money, and is it likely to continue making money in the future?

You see, this is a very loaded question. And Badger Meter, being in the water quality and instrumentation industry, was unexpectedly foreign to me. This is precisely where LLMs can be beneficial by helping bring me up to speed faster, and more effectively. After only 5-10 minutes, I came away with valuable insights into the industry, such as how Badger Meter sells primarily to water utilities, how these customers must acquire water meters to accurately bill their customers’ water usage, and how they are extremely risk-averse, generally preferring to purchase water meters from established incumbents like $BMI.

But as I’ll discuss in the next section, while AI accelerates the research process, it doesn't replace the time required to develop conviction.

Putting it Into Practice

We have more information than ever. We have AI to process it. And that might be the problem.

During the investment process, we have ultimate accessibility to all the informational resources and analytical tools we want, for an extremely low cost. It can be very beneficial for up-front research and gaining initial conviction on an investment opportunity.

The issue?

More information and increased digestibility does NOT always translate to better financial decisions. Instead, we fall victim to suffering conviction and cognitive overload: when the information or tasks you try to process exceed your brain's working memory limit.

Gaining conviction in an investment takes time and energy because you only achieve high conviction from understanding a business thoroughly. A 10 minute speed-run analysis on Badger Meter would not build sufficient knowledge to effectively empower anyone to withstand bear cases or fear-mongering news.

Not only this, but over the long run, our brains can’t process all the information we researched at the very beginning, nor can we perfectly remember the exact thesis throughout the entirety of the holding period.

“Within consumer behavior literature, [information overload] has been shown to diminish confidence, delay action, and increase reliance on heuristics or external cues” - Al-Fattal, 2026

Let’s face it, we’re human. We want answers quickly. We forget things. We act emotionally. We make mistakes.

Instead, the “scarce resource” has shifted from getting enough quality information to:

• Attention
• Judgment
• Memory
• Consistency

Where the Alpha Really Lies

So where does the alpha really lie when thinking about digesting investment information?

Outperformance often comes from putting in effort to do the research, build conviction, and formulate a thesis, then maintaining conviction in your investments when the world tries to convince you otherwise.

This is a key foundational principle of Vassant. In order to be a successful long-term investor, you need to be able to explore information while staying rooted in your original thesis.

You must know why you bought the investment.

You must know the data behind it.

You must know why the investment opportunity aligns with your philosophy.

And most importantly, you’ll then know when it’s time to sell.

Fear-mongering articles, scary-looking YouTube thumbnails, and bear cases no longer throw you off course. To achieve this, you must build a disciplined framework for investing:

• Document your thesis. (Why did you buy the asset?)
• Collect your research. (What backs up your thesis?)
• Define allocation targets. (How comfortable am I with this position in my portfolio?)
• Define allowable entry and exit points. (At what price am I willing to own this asset?)

These will create boundaries that will help manage your emotions and reinforce discipline for the duration you hold the asset. Don’t be the one who lets a random tariff threat throw you off your crown jewel asset. The markets try to do that to you. Stand your ground and brush off the doomsday fears.

And this exact process framework is what Vassant strives to offer its customers.