We’ve made investing easier. I don’t think we’ve made investors better | Opinion
Investing has never been easier to enter or harder to filter.
An investor can now research a company, compare opportunities, analyze financial statements, follow market sentiment, and ask artificial intelligence to challenge an investment thesis without leaving a laptop.
Information that once required teams of analysts can increasingly be accessed in seconds.
That should be creating a generation of extraordinarily informed investors. But access to more information is not the same as knowing what deserves your trust.
Recent evidence exposes that gap.
An April 2026 FINRA Investor Education Foundation analysis of 2024 survey data found that retail investors who used social media for investment information answered an average of just 42 percent of questions correctly on an objective investment knowledge test, even though 63 percent rated their investment knowledge as high.
Meanwhile, PwC’s Global Investor Survey 2025 found that 34 percent of the 1,074 investment professionals surveyed relied on generative AI to a large or very large extent when assessing how companies manage risks and opportunities.
The tools are becoming more powerful. Our judgment does not automatically improve with them.
That distinction matters because modern investing increasingly rewards speed. Opportunities arrive through platforms, private networks, social media, and polished digital presentations.
Knowing When to Say No
AI can summarize the upside in seconds. What it cannot do is eliminate the oldest weaknesses in investing: overconfidence, impatience, fear of missing out, and our tendency to believe compelling stories.
I have come to believe that the most underrated investment skill is not identifying opportunities. It is rejecting them.
Long-term success depends on asking whether the numbers can be independently verified, whether incentives are aligned, whether management remains credible under scrutiny, and whether the opportunity still makes sense after the excitement is stripped away.
Due diligence is not the obstacle standing between an investor and a great opportunity. It is the protection standing between an investor and a convincing mistake.
Trust Your Instincts
I learned this while evaluating an artificial intelligence production company with rapidly growing revenue and ambitious projections.
The opportunity looked compelling. But as I examined the assumptions behind those projections, I found outcomes I could not independently verify.
I respected the founders and wanted the company to succeed. Neither was sufficient reason to put capital behind it. So I walked away.
That discipline matters beyond the investor writing the check. Capital determines which companies expand, which ideas reach the market, and where jobs and resources ultimately flow.
Stay Skeptical
When money moves because of manufactured urgency rather than evidence, the consequences can extend well beyond a portfolio.
The SEC warns that pressure to act immediately and fear of missing out are red flags of investment fraud, while FINRA advises investors to investigate and independently confirm the facts before committing capital.
Urgency may sometimes reflect legitimate business circumstances, but when a deadline becomes more important than answering questions, investors should become more skeptical, not less.
The danger is that technology makes bad investment habits more efficient. More opportunities arrive faster, decisions happen sooner, and confidence can grow without a corresponding increase in understanding.
Investors can mistake access to information for mastery of it, or polished analysis for proof that the underlying business is sound.
Words of Warning
AI can accelerate research, but it can also help investors build increasingly sophisticated arguments for decisions they already want to make.
Without discipline, faster investing does not necessarily become smarter investing. It simply gives poor judgment better tools.
The better future looks different. AI handles the mechanical work while investors become more disciplined about the human work.
Technology can compare financials, test assumptions, identify inconsistencies, and surface questions. Investors still determine whether leadership is credible, incentives make sense, risks are acceptable, and the evidence justifies commitment.
Used that way, AI does not replace judgment. It creates more room for it.
Time to Think
Investors can make that discipline tangible. Before committing capital, they should require three things: independently verified financial assumptions, documented answers to material risks, and a mandatory cooling-off period whenever an opportunity is presented with artificial urgency.
If a deal cannot survive verification, difficult questions, and time to think, losing it may be preferable to winning it.
Technology has democratized access to investing. The next challenge is democratizing the discipline required to do it well. The best investment decision will sometimes be the one that never makes it into the portfolio.
Westin Smith is the Founder and CEO of Fortis Fortuna Holdings, a private investment and strategic advisory firm that works with entrepreneurs, family offices, institutional investors, and government stakeholders.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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