ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN INVESTMENT DECISION-MAKING: BENEFITS, BIASES, AND MARKET IMPLICATIONS
Keywords:
Artificial intelligence; investment decision-making; machine learning; portfolio management; behavioural finance; financial marketsAbstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become more and more central to modern investment management, as it promises faster information processing, better pattern recognition, and more adaptive portfolio strategies. Asset managers, hedge funds, investment banks and robo-advisory platforms now use machine learning, natural language processing and algorithmic optimisation techniques to assist with security selection, portfolio construction, execution and risk monitoring. But the rise of AI in finance also raised serious concerns about data bias, model opacity, overfitting, herding and systemic fragility. This article critically discusses the use of AI in investment decision-making from three interrelated angles: its possible practical benefits, its methodological and institutional constraints, and its overall effect on market behaviour. It argues that AI can materially improve analytical efficiency and decision support, but its value is often oversold where predictive power is confused with sound investment judgement. Investment decisions are not just statistical optimisation problems. They involve uncertainty, institutional constraints, behavioural responses, and the interpretation of economic meanings. AI should therefore not be viewed as a substitute for human judgement but as a sociotechnical decision system whose effectiveness is based on governance, interpretability, and disciplined use.
References
1. Agrawal, A., Gans, J. and Goldfarb, A. (2018) Prediction machines: The simple economics of artificial intelligence. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.
2. Allen, F., Gu, X. and Jagtiani, J. (2022) ‘A survey of fintech research and policy discussion’, Review of Corporate Finance, 2(3–4), pp. 259–339.
3. Bailey, D.H., Borwein, J.M., López de Prado, M. and Zhu, Q.J. (2014) ‘Pseudo-mathematics and financial charlatanism: The effects of backtest overfitting on out-of-sample performance’, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 61(5), pp. 458–471.
4. Boukherouaa, E.B., AlAjmi, K., Deodoro, J., Farias, A., Ravikumar, R. and Tsai, J. (2021) Powering the digital economy: Opportunities and risks of artificial intelligence in finance. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund.
5. Brynjolfsson, E. and McAfee, A. (2017) Machine, platform, crowd: Harnessing our digital future. New York: W.W. Norton.
6. D’Acunto, F., Prabhala, N. and Rossi, A.G. (2019) ‘The promises and pitfalls of robo-advising’, The Review of Financial Studies, 32(5), pp. 1983–2020.
7. Fama, E.F. (1970) ‘Efficient capital markets: A review of theory and empirical work’, The Journal of Finance, 25(2), pp. 383–417.
8. Fisher, T., Garnsey, E. and Hughes, A. (2016) ‘Natural language processing in accounting, finance and management’, British Accounting Review, 48(4), pp. 379–390.
9. Gu, S., Kelly, B. and Xiu, D. (2020) ‘Empirical asset pricing via machine learning’, The Review of Financial Studies, 33(5), pp. 2223–2273.
10. Jabeur, S.B., Mefteh-Wali, S. and Viviani, J.-L. (2023) ‘Artificial intelligence in finance: A bibliometric review and research agenda’, Research in International Business and Finance, 66, 102033.
11. Jiang, Z., Kelly, B. and Xiu, D. (2020) ‘(Re-)Imag(in)ing price trends’, The Journal of Finance, 75(6), pp. 3183–3249.
12. Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, fast and slow. London: Penguin.
13. Lo, A.W. (2017) Adaptive markets: Financial evolution at the speed of thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
14. Lopez de Prado, M. (2018) Advances in financial machine learning. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
15. Markowitz, H. (1952) ‘Portfolio selection’, The Journal of Finance, 7(1), pp. 77–91.
16. Rudin, C. (2019) ‘Stop explaining black box machine learning models for high stakes decisions and use interpretable models instead’, Nature Machine Intelligence, 1(5), pp. 206–215.
17. Sironi, P. (2016) FinTech innovation: From robo-advisors to goal based investing and gamification. Chichester: Wiley.
18. Tetlock, P.C. (2007) ‘Giving content to investor sentiment: The role of media in the stock market’, The Journal of Finance, 62(3), pp. 1139–1168.





