ONE NATION, ONE PORTFOLIO: HOW AI BIAS LEAVES INVESTORS HOLDING THE SAME BAG

Every generation of investors believes it has found a shortcut—a tool to think for them.

- CHANDNI RANI & SIMARJEET SINGH

My father’s relied on phonecall “tips”. Mine turned to YouTube gurus, screeners and Excel models. Today’s shortcut is generative AI. And it’s easy to see why. It explains balance sheets like a finance professor, condenses annual reports effortlessly, and serves up stock ideas with calm, confident fluency. It feels tireless, precise and wise.But beneath it lies a risk. Generative AI doesn’t broaden how we think about investing—it narrows it. By leaning on familiar data and patterns, it quietly reinforces familiarity bias. The danger is convergence: portfolios that look alike, share the same blind spots, and fail together—not because AI knows too much, but because it masks what it doesn’t know with confidence.

We imagine Al as a diligent analyst that scans filings and evaluates fundamentals before forming views. But that’s not what it does. Gen Al doesn't “think” —it predicts. It arranges the most statistically likely words in the most statistically likely order. And what dominates its training diet? Firms with the biggest digital footprints—big banks, telecom firms, IT giants and other large caps.