The research behind Pinpoint Alpha

There's a critical difference between confidence and accuracy, and more information widens the gap between them.

Researchers at the University of Chicago ran three experiments testing what happens when decision-makers receive increasing amounts of data. The result: confidence rose significantly with each additional piece of information, but accuracy barely moved. People don't adjust for the fact that their brains can't actually process the additional inputs. They just feel more certain while being no more correct.

This shows up in real portfolios. A landmark study in The Journal of Finance tracked 66,465 real investor accounts over five years. The investors who traded the most, driven by confidence in the information they were consuming, earned 6.5 percentage points less per year than the market. More data led to more activity, and more activity destroyed returns.

A separate study found that when investors gained access to faster online trading tools and more market data, their returns dropped by over 5 percentage points compared to their own prior performance. Same investors, same market. Just more information access, and worse outcomes.

If more data isn't the answer, what is? The research points to depth over breadth.

A study in The Journal of Finance tracked mutual fund performance over 15 years and found that managers who concentrated their holdings in a few industries they knew deeply outperformed diversified managers by 1.2% per year on a risk-adjusted basis. A separate analysis from Harvard Business School took this further: fund managers' highest-conviction positions, the handful of stocks they knew best, outperformed the market by 2.8% to 4.5% annually. The rest of their holdings, the filler picked to meet diversification mandates, added nothing.

This pattern holds for individual investors too. A study of 66,465 household brokerage accounts found that investors who concentrated their portfolios in fewer stocks outperformed those with diversified accounts, particularly when they invested in names they were familiar with. The edge came from genuine information advantages built through repeated, focused engagement.

Economists at NYU and Columbia formalized this into a mathematical proof: rational investors who can choose where to direct their attention will naturally specialize in a small number of assets, because the more you know about something, the more valuable additional learning becomes. It's a virtuous cycle: focus creates knowledge, knowledge creates edge, edge rewards focus.

This is why Pinpoint Alpha tracks 15 tickers per subscriber. Not 50. Not 500. Fifteen names you choose, tracked deeply every single day, with flow patterns that compound into a multi-week narrative you can't get from scanning a dashboard.

Here's a finding that surprises people: when MIT and NBER researchers studied equity analyst reports, they found that the written narrative analysis, the qualitative “here's what we think is happening” section, contained market-moving information that the raw numbers alone did not. When they included the narrative in their statistical models, the quantitative measures (earnings forecasts, price targets, ratings) lost their significance. The story wasn't decoration on top of the data. The story was the signal.

This aligns with broader research on how humans process complex information. A foundational study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology presented identical evidence to two groups: one received it as a structured narrative, the other as raw unorganized facts. Same information, different format. The narrative group made significantly more confident and decisive judgments. Raw recall of individual facts was the same across both groups. It was the organization into a coherent story that improved decision quality.

Nobel laureate Robert Shiller made this the centerpiece of his 2017 Presidential Address to the American Economic Association: narratives, not raw data, are what actually drive investment decisions. The human brain is built for stories. Fighting that wiring by presenting investors with data tables and dashboards is working against biology.

Every Pinpoint Alpha email is a narrative. Each one covers what the options and trade tape showed today, what it means in the context of this week, and what conditions would change the picture. What you get is a short, plain-English read of how the market is positioned and what it means for the stocks you follow. The research says that format is easier to read and produces a better signal.

This is the finding that convinced us the product should exist.

Researchers at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business fed complex corporate disclosures into an AI and compared the AI-generated summaries against the original full-length documents. The summaries were dramatically shorter. They were also better predictors of subsequent stock price movements. The AI synthesis didn't just save time. It produced a higher-fidelity signal than the raw source material.

Meanwhile, Wharton researchers reviewed 97 head-to-head comparisons of simple versus complex forecasting methods across 32 published papers. The result: not a single study found that more complexity reliably improved forecast accuracy. On average, complexity increased forecast errors by 27%. The simple models won because complex models overfit to noise, mistaking randomness for patterns and degrading when applied to new data.

Our pipeline ingests thousands of data points every evening: options chains, institutional trade prints, dark pool activity, volatility surfaces, open interest shifts. From there, it computes a focused set of metrics, each one graded against what the market did next. Then an AI synthesizes those metrics into a narrative analysis for each of your 15 tickers. The raw data goes in. A clear, actionable read comes out. The research says that compression is a gain in signal quality, not a loss of information.

A field experiment published in Management Science tested how investors respond to three types of advice: pure human, pure AI, and human-curated AI. Investors were significantly more likely to follow recommendations from the human+AI combination than from either source alone, especially for higher-stakes decisions. The researchers found that having a human expert validate and contextualize AI-generated insights didn't compromise quality. It increased adoption.

There's a good reason for this. Separate research from Wharton found that people abandon purely algorithmic tools faster than human advisors after seeing equivalent errors, even when the algorithm objectively outperforms. This means that a pure AI product, no matter how accurate, faces a trust deficit that a human-curated product does not.

Pinpoint Alpha is AI-generated and human-curated. The data pipeline and analysis engine are algorithmic. The interpretation rules, signal prioritization, and quality control are designed and maintained by a human who trades the same markets and uses the same data daily. This isn't a black box that spits out “bullish” or “bearish.” It's a system built by someone who understands what these signals mean in practice, using AI to scale that understanding across 15 tickers every day.