I can tell you with high confidence what the strategy and performance of 99% of such AI first funds will be:
- raw trend following
- average market returns, minus fees
They might be slightly more profitable internally, because lower token costs than salaries.
But they will also massively amplify market moves both up and down, because they will all have roughly the same thesis and same TA, so they will buy and sell all at once.
True alpha remains 100% human (for now)!
Either you are better at interpreting information, making decisions or you have exclusive and valuable data. That's it.
There's no alpha in AI sloping your decisions.
CNBC just filmed a hedge fund where every employee is an AI agent.
Payroll: $40,000 a year, all 4 of them. His last team cost $5,000,000 and burned him out of the business.
Watch him introduce the staff.
> Houston runs the place.
> Doocey is the red team. His only job is to break every trade idea before money touches it.
> Steffi, yes, Steffi Graf, marks up the charts. >Desmond runs the quant strategies over the weekend.
The human kept one job. He calls it the meat in the chair. Pressing the button.
7 or 8 people in New York, Hong Kong and California could not cover a crypto market that trades at 3am.
4 bots do. He started them on Claude Opus 4.6 and they have not slept since. 10x the output, his number, not mine.
527,000 people watched this in 8 days. Your timeline skipped it.
His forecast for Wall Street, on camera: one hedge fund manager, 1 or 2 humans under him, a swarm of agents under them. And for himself: "Maybe someday old BK will just have to be at the beach"