Arnout ter Schure: Why AI Won't Replace Humans in Market Analysis

Arnout ter Schure, founder of the analytical platform Intelligent Investing, has formulated a principle increasingly heard in the professional investment community: artificial intelligence and human judgment are not competitors, but partners with clearly defined roles. Intelligent Investing positions itself as a research platform for market analysis. At its foundation lies the belief that AI can qualitatively expand the capabilities of financial forecasting—primarily through processing large volumes of data in real time.

Where an analyst would spend hours aggregating information from dozens of sources, an algorithm accomplishes this in seconds. Beyond speed, AI offers two additional advantages: it accelerates the development of trading strategies and ensures their systematic execution without emotional deviations. Emotional factors are traditionally considered one of the main reasons for errors in portfolio management—an algorithm is simply devoid of this.

However, ter Schure insists that beneath these technical capabilities lies a fundamental limitation. AI excels at processing structured data, but performs poorly at what financiers call "market context"—understanding the macroeconomic situation, geopolitical risks, the sentiment of market participants, and those non-obvious connections that an experienced analyst grasps intuitively. The translation of data into meaningful market perspective still requires human intelligence.

The approach of Intelligent Investing fits into the broader discussion about the role of AI in the financial industry. Large asset management companies and hedge funds actively implement machine learning to analyze alternative data—from satellite imagery of retail parking lots to the sentiment of corporate press releases. At the same time, most of them maintain teams of analysts: not because they distrust algorithms, but because they understand—a decision about a transaction requires judgment, not just computation.

The philosophy of "human plus machine" appears to be a pragmatic answer to the question that the entire financial sector is asking itself today. Not "will AI replace analysts," but "how to build cooperation in which the strengths of each reinforce one another." Based on the experience of Intelligent Investing, the answer lies in clear division of labor: the algorithm takes on routine work and scale, the human takes on meaning and responsibility.