Brett Caughran

ENROLLING NOW. AI Accelerator: Agents in the Investment Process I am very excited to announce our new cohort based program called AI Accelerator: Agents in the Investment Process Chatbots were interesting, but far from transformational to the institutional investment process. In my opinion, the impact of agents in the investment process has the potential to completely rewire how investors do work. However, we are still in the "demo era" of agents for institutional investing and the necessary ingredients for institutional scaling are still being developed. We have designed a 6-month, live cohort structure to explore this possibility with incredible depth, including: > A 3-hour live Zoom Foundations Seminar June 8th to example the investment process, examine agents, and embark on the journey together of embedding agents > Five monthly Workflow Labs where we will provide a detailed workflow brief and the necessary Skills.md files, then guide the cohort through customizing and implementing an agentic approach into that workflow > Monthly office hours & guest speakers with the interesting vendors & builders in this space > All of the digital curriculum from our Sep '25 AI Cohort, including 15+ recorded guest speakers. 15+ hours in total, available today. > A group discord & mail bag to explore this fascinating trend together & share learnings (where a lot of the magic happens in the Fundamental Edge programs) > A December 7th Implementation Seminar where we will work guide the cohort on bringing discrete workflows into a coherent, AI-native operating layer The objective is simple. You will walk away with: > A personal Skills.md library > Five working agentic workflows > Material gains in speed & rigor > An AI-native operating cadence > The support & relationships built in a cohort > Alumni access to our upcoming in-person AI events The program is designed to be tool-agnostic and built around the foundations of the emerging capability set of Agentic Workspaces with MCP connectors & Skills.md workflow instructions (we suggest bringing a subscription to Claude Cowork, Copilot Cowork, Perplexity Computer or Codex). The program is designed as a cohort, but if your team is looking to build aligned literacy on agents in the investment process we also offer team discounts & custom programs, including tailored, in-office engagements. To learn more, see our website. We are also hosting an information session on May 28th (will post both in replies). Thank you!

@OneManLBO @bucketshopcap Got office space in Coeur d’ Alene and will be there for 6 weeks this summer. Hit me up if you make it up north

@FundamentEdge @bucketshopcap Brett, come back to Idaho!

Def not a dunk on TBU but a lot of young guys are understandably solving for P&Lmaxxing. Having kids will change everything, be prepared- we all learn it only through the experience. Bet @FundamentEdge would have some thoughts/advice on how mid-level and above ppl make it work.

@SandyZhu163519 Yes, of course!

@FundamentEdge Can I enroll as an individual investor?

ENROLLING NOW. AI Accelerator: Agents in the Investment Process I am very excited to announce our new cohort based program called AI Accelerator: Agents in the Investment Process Chatbots were interesting, but far from transformational to the institutional investment process. In my opinion, the impact of agents in the investment process has the potential to completely rewire how investors do work. However, we are still in the "demo era" of agents for institutional investing and the necessary ingredients for institutional scaling are still being developed. We have designed a 6-month, live cohort structure to explore this possibility with incredible depth, including: > A 3-hour live Zoom Foundations Seminar June 8th to example the investment process, examine agents, and embark on the journey together of embedding agents > Five monthly Workflow Labs where we will provide a detailed workflow brief and the necessary Skills.md files, then guide the cohort through customizing and implementing an agentic approach into that workflow > Monthly office hours & guest speakers with the interesting vendors & builders in this space > All of the digital curriculum from our Sep '25 AI Cohort, including 15+ recorded guest speakers. 15+ hours in total, available today. > A group discord & mail bag to explore this fascinating trend together & share learnings (where a lot of the magic happens in the Fundamental Edge programs) > A December 7th Implementation Seminar where we will work guide the cohort on bringing discrete workflows into a coherent, AI-native operating layer The objective is simple. You will walk away with: > A personal Skills.md library > Five working agentic workflows > Material gains in speed & rigor > An AI-native operating cadence > The support & relationships built in a cohort > Alumni access to our upcoming in-person AI events The program is designed to be tool-agnostic and built around the foundations of the emerging capability set of Agentic Workspaces with MCP connectors & Skills.md workflow instructions (we suggest bringing a subscription to Claude Cowork, Copilot Cowork, Perplexity Computer or Codex). The program is designed as a cohort, but if your team is looking to build aligned literacy on agents in the investment process we also offer team discounts & custom programs, including tailored, in-office engagements. To learn more, see our website. We are also hosting an information session on May 28th (will post both in replies). Thank you!

As a junior analyst, do not, and I repeat *do not* use AI to write an investment thesis. Particularly if you are using said thesis to try to get a job. Your job is to use AI to find creative ways to go incredibly deep on the key drivers of a business with AI, then create rigorous due diligence tracking systems for the key drivers. And FOR SURE highlight that work as part of your pitch. You are trying to highlight the tool as something that deepens insight formation on the business and the stock, not something that took a 40 hour process down to 2 hours and produced AI Slop. For so many PMs, this will be an automatic ding. Create a “pitch pushback” agent to find logical gaps, anticipate questions, and get suggestions on coherent idea flow. But the final product should be something that is 100% produced by hand.

@dcfdude @blueprintsmb22 🫡

@blueprintsmb22 Hey don’t forget @FundamentEdge build the world’s pre-eminent analyst training firm and soon-to-be automated multi-manager agentic hedge fund

Someone today pinged me about a former colleague of ours who was a TMT public equities portfolio manager for 2 decades at a number of shops and asked me if I knew what he was doing. I didn't so I did a casual google search and saw he is now a registered broker at a bank doing equity sales. So now when people ask me what market neutral equity portfolio managers do in their 40s after leaving the industry, I can add equity sales man to the following list: - Buy a small manufacturing biz (me) - Work in investor relations at a publicly traded company, become CFO - Work as CFO/biz development for AI startup - Business development for mega pod, head a division - Mini-sabbatical, trying to figure out life - Work for third party investor relations firm for publicly traded companies - Allocator, fund of funds - Long only - Senior analyst role for colleague who got a book somewhere else - Real estate - Bought into a franchise system (not food related) - Went back to credit buyside - Went to sellside equity research What else have people done?

And the next massive financial software opportunity is making finance agents as easy to set up as a Bloomberg launch pad

Quietly, Google Finance sucks a lot less than it used to. The new Beta version has similar workflow capabilities to many 2025-era finance chatbots (for free). Earnings summaries, overview of financials, and an embedded chatbot that isn't bad. Not an institutional tool, but a decently helpful free chatbot for retail investors.

$PTLO & $SG were textbook breakage band shorts, but possibly played out (not investment advice) 10 is highest risk

@FundamentEdge so which restys we shorting???

In 2008 when I started as a junior analyst at a Tiger Cub, I did a teach in with John Glass of Morgan Stanley. He showed me a very compelling analysis of casual diners and how there was a high propensity for concepts to come off the rails around 100 boxes. The inference was that, around that scale, management focus was diluted and the concept had picked the low hanging fruit and had to stretch into new & unproven geographies. Quite often, the new geographies wouldn't scale and the stocks felt the dual pressure of an earnings re-base and compression of the growth multiple. In looking for restaurant short ideas, this ~100 unit threshold become a consistent & reliable "pattern" that I would apply across concepts. This wasn't a deterministic process, but a reliable filtering mechanism for going deeper and hunting aggressively for signs of pattern alignment (often times, great concepts would grow through this level unimpeded). But it was a lot of work!! It would take me many weeks to build conviction on one of these ideas. Fast forward 18 years, and I can put a "pattern" like this into an agentic architecture. And with the right data ingested, I could automate analyses like: > Scoring of new site selection (automated demographics, MSA & brand awareness analysis) > New unit AUV vs. existing System AUV ramp > Cohort productivity tracking > Subtle languages shifts on expansion pace > Executive departures (COO or real estate office departures were interesting triggers) Analysis that I would do before, now at the push of a button: i.e. the ability to scale depth in a way never possible. The deeper I go into agentic processes, the more I realize that deep sector & vertical processes are where the real value is unlocked. There is ~minimal value in a generic earnings preview skill. But an earnings preview architecture encoded with the set-up & reporting patterns powered by your pattern recognition - now we have something. Not "XYZ managed care company is going to miss Q3 earnings", but a deep articulation of guidance hockey stick dynamics in that space, supported by deep regulatory filings work, management sentiment analysis intra-quarter, all my internal notes, a comprehensive healthcare trend tracker, and your own historical trading history in shorting these sort of set-ups. Again...the sort of work I would do as a managed care analyst, but deeply automated. What does this all mean? How do I build this out? Well, that's a work in progress. But as a build consideration, here is what i would recommend: > Begin to attempt to find the patterns in your investing. Patterns vary *materially* by strategy & by sector. I don't think any vendor or consultant (including me) will be able to give you an off the shelf pattern library: this will be deeply personal to your firm, your process, and your risk & duration envelope > Above all, view the technology stack as a flexible substrate to express these processes & patterns. A pattern such as above was very difficult to wrap in a chatbot (early finance chatbots like Portrait AI did a very interesting job in doing so and was popular amongst generalists for that reason, but it was a lot of work). My sense is some of the highest ROI motion for investors right now is *not* to get fluent in spinning up sub-agents in Claude Code CLI, but to actually put pen to paper on their process & patterns and let the super app / agentic workspaces catch up (I am running this process in Perplexity Computer and something like this takes about 15 minutes to spin up....THOUGH you need the awareness of the underlying logic of this pattern to tell the agentic what to design...this is where the advantage will sit in my opinion).

This is EXACTLY the sort of inside baseball stuff I'm talking about. In Medicare Advantage, similar prior that too much excess growth without Stars improvement often ends up as a big margin issue (and shows up in Q2 but really Q3). All these little things, the "bag of tricks" are what can superpower agents

Interesting, there is a idea when banks grow via new hires. that growth is risky & less creditworthy (IE bad growth). Why? When you hire an originator all his good loans are w/his last employer and new loan growth is loans that got denied from his prior employer. That is the loan origintors "low hanging fruit"

Developed by doing the job, or, in this specific instance, by mentoring from a senior at my firm to meet with John and learn this framework I do think it can be developed without decades of experience. Digging more in the concept of "lessons from history" and how to elicit these patterns with agentic research

This full analysis, including the process wiki, skills architecture & sample outputs will be shared in the July workflow lab for our AI Accelerator as an example of the "art of the possible" with agents. NOT that we expect our students to all start shorting restaurant concepts at ~100 boxes, but as a flexible process example with which they can plug in their own patterns: fundamentedge.com/ai-accelerator

@plainyogurt21 It’s our responsibility as adults to make sure the kids are ok. I can’t think of anything more fundamentally human.

Moral responsibility is to the juniors? Do you think the optimal solution will be 20% of the juniors but focused on training them rather than using for free work. Curious if you disagree, but Two types of juniors 1. Free work 2. Mentee One should separate both of these. Few have found how to do this and often conflate the two where learners are also free work only.

I was in New York last week and for the first time I'm starting to hear senior investment professionals think seriously about the incremental utility of junior investment talent. Agents are solving process bottlenecks that heretofore required the efforts of junior investment talent across modeling, meeting prep, and data analysis. ”I may not need to hire a junior after all”, It is a more common refrain. And it's widespread enough that I do think some concern is now warranted. My response back is: what if you just fundamentally rethought the role of the junior investor? What if instead of updating models, updating weekly industry data drops, writing first cut earnings previews, and building out management question lists, the responsibility stack of a junior dramatically changed? What if you simply challenged the junior investor to develop more accurate and timely revenue forecasts across three dozen names? And the apprenticeship role almost felt more like an AI enabled data scientist, while that person develops their own investor toolkit. What if you challenged that junior analyst to be an in-house AI-enabled risk analyst? Building AI-augmented risk checklists, counter pitches on every idea in the portfolio & pipeline? What if you challenged that junior to become the most AI-fluent person on the team, putting them through an intensive six-month AI self-study? Which, for your senior investors with portfolio responsibility, is very difficult to find the time. The junior then, through the apprenticeship period, becomes a highly value-added generalist. And during that apprenticeship period, where they're mostly a cost center, they develop into a true AI-augmented investor, and at year three will drive dramatically positive ROI to the firm. Same apprenticeship model, but rethought in specific structure. The foundational reality still exists that your junior investor for a scaled investment firm is going to be a rounding error in terms of comp. The consideration of slowing down junior hiring isn't a cost consideration, it's an efficiency consideration. And while much of the traditional junior stack is quickly becoming abstracted into agents, I do think there is a real potential to rethink the role of junior investors to the effect of very attractive ROI. I do think, to a large degree, we have some moral responsibility to do this as well. In a competitive business, it is absolutely imperative that we drive efficiencies and research quality with all the tools at our disposal. That definitionally will impact the existing role of juniors more than seniors. I'm feeling a bit more of a mission to help firms rethink how they deploy junior talent. If you're doing the same, I'd love to connect and find creative ways to rethink the junior role in fundamental investing firms.

@ChrisCubitt We can actively make introductions where appropriate, but are careful not to promise or imply placements as getting a job at a hedge fund is a multi-dimensional consideration. Our programs are just one small piece of a candidacy

@FundamentEdge Job placements at the end of the training? I ask because there are programs in this space that offer placements to exceptional graduates. Fan of your work and love what you’re doing.

@Computers2121 @CashWithDara Probably correct Elite teams of the future are likely to be smaller than they have been in the past, even with redeployment

@FundamentEdge @CashWithDara I think this makes sense but doesn’t address the true underlying issue that the industry is facing for young people. You just described a role that could be occupied by 1-2 people at a decent sized company. Still nowhere near the amount of junior analysts that used to be hired

@thedatagap Agree. Agents ability to audit and guide the human auditing process is an under discussed unlock, imo

@dennisihong Smart way to rethink the undergrad resume/experience

Recently talked a rising sophomore out of interning with me this summer. The analyst role is clearly becoming compressed by AI. So I told him to get into a professor’s ML research lab on campus, contribute to an open source AI project, or intern at a company actually deploying AI in a serious way rather than a legacy firm using it as a buzzword. Those are the skills that will actually matter in junior investment analyst roles in the future.

@thedatagap Not solved yet but promising progress

@CashWithDara Open mindedness. There is a sense that everyone is just so insanely busy trying to adopt AI. If the ”junior AI generalist” model could facilitate that, I think people will be really open.

@FundamentEdge What was their response after your follow up questions?