The best investment approach for ordinary people is pure observational social investing—finding information asymmetry and trading on it, without blending in fundamentals or technicals.
Chris Camillo argues that the most accessible and effective investing strategy for regular people is pure observational social investing: detecting change in the world, connecting it to companies, and trading on information the market hasn't yet priced in. ✦ AI generated
Chris Camillo · My First Million · 2026-07-29 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 48:27
“I'm curious if this is something that others have been doing or there's people you look up to. So, for example, somebody who you wouldn't think is an observational trader, wouldn't call that is Warren Buffett, but there's some great stories of where he did exactly what you're talking about.”
The concept of information asymmetry is not new to investing methodologies. The most famous person to adopt it widely would have been Peter Lynch with the Mellin fund in the 80s. The difference is being a pure observational social arb investor is this concept that it shouldn't be part of an investing methodology but it should be the only thing that you take into consideration. Right? So Peter Lynch kind of blended this this observational investing approach. He would famously walk the malls and kind of look at what stores had the longest lines at the cash register. Seems pretty simple, right? And he would combine that with massive amounts of fundamental research. You have to ask yourself though if the market is relatively efficient and we know the market's never perfectly efficient, but it's if it's relatively efficient in terms of taking into account all the fundamentals and all the technicals and you have all these investors that are trying to price a company based on all the known things. Then if you're able to surface something that's unknown that is meaningful, you don't need to worry about all the other stuff. You don't need to have this robust fundamental technical approach that also happens to apply information asymmetry when you come across it. You can focus all of your energy and all of your research on just finding new information that the market hasn't discovered yet and making an assumption that the particular company that you're trading is relatively efficient with all the known information and investors haven't fully priced in this new piece of information. So all you care about is that one piece of information asymmetry. It simplifies the way that investors can approach this game because most of us are never going to be technically proficient investors and never going to be able to compete with the absolute best most pedigreed Wharton graduated like fundamental investors. I mean I don't want to play that game. The easiest game to play because you can invest a million different ways. So the question is what is the best approach to investing that the largest chunk of ordinary people can actually apply efficiently to markets and regularly do that in a fruitful way. And I strongly believe it's pure observational social investing.
verbatim transcript · starts at 48:27
48:15situation? Is this >> No, this is this is this is a kind of a global cultural shift and it's it's a big observation I've had for 3 years which is based in part I don't know if you guys ever read Nasim Taleb's book black swan >> uh but black swan theory essentially says that our minds are not capable of fully recognizing and appreciating anomalies in the market or the world
48:47that haven't happened before. I had this thesis in early days AI that AI wouldn't just be the next internet. It's not just going to be the next mobile phone or smartphone, but that it would be meaningfully larger than anything we've experienced in our lifetime. And as a result of that, we would see the biggest trades of our life happen um as a direct result of AI. And even when
49:18the information was right in front of us, the market would not believe it until it actually shows up in the numbers because there's no precedent for what we're seeing in AI. There's nothing that has ever happened in our lifetime before AI that we can compare to AI. Now I might regret saying this in 10 years but I don't think so. I think the concept of intelligence becoming
49:47infinite and free to the world is going to be the biggest change we've ever seen in humanity. So the reason why Amazon went down and has not really gone up as a company meaningfully over you know recently right is because they have made such an aggressive investment in AI $200 billion now it's like 200 it's more than 200 billion this last year uh capex investment in AI in a sector that nobody
50:17knows if it's going to pay off for them or not. Does that mean like um like for example the did your guys' Siri or what's it called? Alexa did your Alexa just change where like now she like talks to you like my Alexa just changed so now it like talks like chat GBT like I can ask real questions. >> I would say the biggest example is this
50:34is it's this simple. Amazon is betting the entire company on AI. End of story. As is some of the other big tech companies, right? They are leveraging all of their profits. They're leveraging their balance sheet. They are building out massive in infrastructure unlike they ever had in the history of the company. They are making the biggest capex investment of any company in the world by a big margin in AI. And the
51:03world is still unsure about how this is going to play out. I'm not unsure. I'm willing to bet it all. They they think that the infrastructure layer of AI which is Amazon. Okay. Because Amazon understand this. They are a chip company, right? Their tranium, their chips alone, their tranium AI chips are generating like $50 billion of revenue this next year. They are the one of the largest infrastructure data center
51:30companies in the entire world. and their AWS platform and everything that they've constructed in cloud computing over the past 15 plus years sits at the center of this architecture uh infrastructure for AI. Okay. On top of that, Amazon is the third largest digital advertising company in the world. Okay. So as AI makes advertising meaningfully more efficient and targeted and effective and personal and rich for consumers. Amazon is at the center of that wave.
- ·The market is relatively efficient on known fundamentals and technicals.
- ·Focus entirely on surfacing unknown information the market hasn't priced in.
- ·No need to blend fundamentals or technicals—just find information asymmetry.
- ·Lynch walked malls for observational clues but blended it with heavy fundamental research.
- ·Pure OSI means observation is the only input, not a supplement.
- ·Simplifies investing: compete on discovery, not on technical or fundamental skill.
- ·Most people can't match top pedigree fundamental or technical investors.
- ·Pure OSI is the easiest game to play with many ways to invest.
- ·Best approach for the largest chunk of people to apply fruitfully and regularly.