Ryan Nauman hosts Zephyr’s Adjusted for Risk podcast from Lake Tahoe and interviews Jacob Ayres-Thomson, founder and CEO of 3AI, about how AI is shifting wealth management from understanding AI to implementing it for investing. Jacob explains 3AI’s “Alpha Intelligence,” which targets equity outperformance through predictive insights delivered for people, quant models, and AI-powered funds/indices. He describes his background in equities trading, stochastic asset modeling, and machine learning, and why humans struggle with stock picking due to noisy markets, insufficient data for reliable learning, and benchmark effects driven by market-cap concentration. They discuss AI’s role in increasing market efficiency, removing the analysis bottleneck by condensing vast data into forecasts and explainable research, and how advisors can use robust, statistically tested AI signals and indices, including products built with S&P Global.
Learn more about Zephyr here.
Learn more about 3AI here.
00:00 Welcome to the Podcast
01:18 Meet Jacob Ayres-Thomson
02:00 What 3AI Does
05:55 Why Stock Picking Is Hard
08:24 Learning From Noisy Markets
11:28 Speculation and Market Cycles
14:28 Stocks as a Never Ending Game
15:25 How AI Changes Investing
17:38 Alpha Intelligence in Practice
20:01 AI as the Analysis Engine
21:14 Wrapping Up the AI Thesis
22:03 AI Is Not One Thing
23:39 Markets Get More Efficient
25:44 Where Alpha Still Exists
26:52 Humans Plus AI Together
29:16 Alpha Intelligence Scoring
29:59 Stock Specific Factor Weights
33:47 Causality Versus Correlation
37:30 Moneyball Investing Analogy
39:26 Advisors Using AI Tools
41:25 Due Diligence On Forecasts
42:36 Where To Learn More
44:34 Podcast Wrap Up
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