Excess Returns The Edge Has Shifted | Matt Reustle on How the Best Investors Use AI
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Feb 25, 2026 Matt Russell, founder of Business Breakdowns and Colossus, is an investor known for deep investment analysis. He discusses how AI moved from hype to practical tools for research and monitoring. Short takes cover agentic AI vs LLMs, AI in due diligence and earnings monitoring, prompt engineering, encoding mental models, and how AI reshapes workflows and team structures.
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Earnings Season Happy Hour Tradeoff
- Russell recounts late Thursday nights as a sell-side analyst sifting earnings transcripts while colleagues enjoyed Manhattan happy hour.
- Automating that transcript combing with AI removed the weekend grind and freed time for higher-value work.
Trust But Verify By Requiring Sources
- Always ask LLMs for sources and include source requests in prompts to guard against hallucinations.
- Russell advises prompting for sources on any projections and using stricter output modes to reduce reasoning flexibility when you need fewer hallucinations.
Begin With Process Mapping Then Try Premium LLMs
- Start small: journal your research process, identify the slowest steps, then test premium LLM tiers for writing and research before buying specialized tools.
- Russell advises paying for higher-tier models for better outputs, then assess off-the-shelf investor tools if needed.