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Hi, I'm Jack Woodruff.

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I am the founder and former CIO of Candlestick Capital Management, a long short equity hedge

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fund based in Greenwich, Connecticut. Before founding Candlestick, I was a partner and

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portfolio manager at Surveyor Capital, which is a division of Citadel.

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Very cool. Thanks, Jack. So the reason we did this this way is we've had this conversation

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before, and I think this is one of the most enlightening folks to chat with, given that

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Jack has spent his career picking stocks in an environment that's changing more than it

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ever was before. So we'll treat this really as a fireside shot. So Jack, paint the picture for us.

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What does fundamental investing look like in the age of AI, say five years from now?

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Well, it's hard to say. Like long-term stock picking, I don't believe is really going to

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change much at all. There's always been a mosaic and there's always been alpha creation by finding

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a divergent view. So that isn't going to change at all. I think that that still will stay the same.

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Now, how people synthesize all of the information and where table stakes go to in terms of what

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everybody has and then how you synthesize that data is going to change completely.

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The traditional roles of, say, a portfolio manager or an analyst are going to be completely thrown

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upon their heads. And I still think it's too early to say what that's all going to look like

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as these tools are just so new, especially to the users. You've got a lot of people doing

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a few things, but it's just not clear to me that it's like we're there and oh my gosh,

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it's going to be these new things. We have a bunch of other things to kind of talk about, but

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But I think it's going to be super fascinating to watch how it all plays out.

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Very cool.

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So at Citadel, you had 18 people covering 400 stocks.

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And at Candlestick, you had 30 stock pickers.

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Could one great analyst cover all 400 by 2030?

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So the biggest issue is humans are still the

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I mean, like at the end of the day, you have to get the information into your head.

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So it's really all about sort of how man and machine can work together.

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Investment management is a time management exercise.

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What I mean by that, if I spent all of my time working on one stock, that'd be great.

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I'd probably know it better than anyone else in the world.

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But if there wasn't anything to do in that stock, there isn't much to do.

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Well, if I do two, well, then I have half as much time and so forth until I go.

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So you start getting diminishing returns on how much time you could spend on any particular stock.

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So, you know, what can AI do?

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Can AI help me cover more names?

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Perhaps.

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Maybe it allows me to raise the table stakes on what I just kind of like have as a general knowledge

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because that work used to take me hours to prepare,

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to get me ready for what it was.

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And now maybe an AI program can help me prepare a lot of that work

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in five minutes, which used to take me six to eight hours.

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So that allows me to do other things.

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Again, it's a very competitive industry.

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So it's not like if I get rid of all these people

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or if I have five analysts, whereas before I had 30,

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yeah, maybe those people can do more.

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but now all of a sudden this opens up time

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that I could spend doing either more proprietary research,

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channel checks, more sort of like industry backdrop work

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because again, like you're going to need to find these divergent views.

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So it's like if I do the exact same thing I was doing before

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and it's like, hey, wow, I can get my work done in two hours,

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well, someone else is going to be still working 16 hours a day

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trying to find that extra thing

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that's going to

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make you money.

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Because just doing this stuff is obviously like what we used to pay an analyst to do a year or two ago is not what we're going to be paying an analyst to be doing in a year.

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Very cool. And on that, what is something today that a junior analyst does that you think will be absurd if they're still doing in five years?

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Well, it's funny.

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It's like, oh, you're not going to be reading 10Ks.

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You're not going to be reading transcripts.

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I actually don't believe that to be true.

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If you're truly close to a name,

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you're going to still need to process a lot of that information.

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Now, you might be able to get summarized versions

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that can cut down the time it takes you to do those things,

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but you still need to get that information sort of into your head.

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we used to have a lot of analysts

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that would be going through a lot of big data

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and things like that

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I definitely think that can be outsourced

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and that will be super easy

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I would be surprised if a lot of these guys

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aren't necessarily doing that stuff

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but

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what I believe

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the AI is going to do

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or the agent or whoever it is

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is going to be

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pushing you in the right direction

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to work on the right names.

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Like I said, this is time management.

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It's all about how do I know to work on the right things,

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and that's where the winners are going to be,

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is the people who can figure out how to use these tools

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to get you to spend the right amount of time

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working on potentially finding a divergent view.

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Very cool.