Do you read financial statements or rely on Youtube/Summaries/AI?

I drop all of these into AI. Copy and paste, then ask for a summary or synopsis; top 20 most important bullet points. For YouTube, copy and paste and download the transcription into AI, and do the same procedure.

If I’m putting my money into an investment, I want to know about it, which means financial statements and edited/fact-checked journalism. I enjoy reading people’s opinions about investment, but never treat as fact anything a random person says on Reddit or YouTube. I’ve found the best investment opportunities come when you can see the common wisdom is wrong. LLMs are best seen as common wisdom dispensers. They’ll tell you what everyone is saying, but you can’t just blindly follow what they say to do.

By the time you're done reading these things either directly or though AI, automated platforms will already have priced in whatever they say. This is reason 72646 why retail investors shouldn't be touching individual stocks.

I work in financial compliance, a big part of our job is making sure all those 8-K's, 10-K's, 10-Q's, and all prospectuses are tagged with XBRL correctly so when submitted to the SEC they're machine readable as well as human readable. By the time I read and comprehend what I'm looking at, any publicly disseminated filings have indeed already been consumed and analyzed and traded on. I'll just keep putting money in indexes and hoping the line goes up and to the right.

The one thing AI is useful for : company financials. I used it to summarize NOW's financials when the stock seemed undervalued and I realized it was a buy at 90.

I read the annual and quarterly filings, but I stopped trying to read them like a book. I go in with one question from the previous quarter that actually matters, usually whether a number moved because of a one-time item or because the underlying business changed. From there I jump to the cash flow statement, the footnote tied to that question, and the earnings call Q&A where management gets asked about it directly. AI is useful for finding every place that number is mentioned and flagging language that changed year over year, but I still read those few pages myself. The risk with a pure summary is that it flattens exactly the parts you should be suspicious of.

I look at the consolidated cash flow statements in the 10Ks at a minimum.