How AI and Technology Are Changing the Way People Invest in Stocks

For most of modern financial history, investing in the stock market required either a significant amount of capital, a broker who could act on your behalf, or both. The average person was largely a spectator to a system built around institutional players, professional intermediaries, and geographic proximity to financial centres. That picture has changed considerably, and the arrival of artificial intelligence in mainstream investing tools is the latest, and arguably the most consequential, chapter in that shift.

AI-powered investing is no longer confined to hedge funds running proprietary algorithms. It’s in the stock-screening tools on retail apps, in the risk-analysis features that flag when a portfolio is overexposed to a single sector, and in the real-time data feeds that help individual investors make decisions that would previously have required an entire research team. 

That shift has coincided with another: for investors in Nigeria, the barrier to owning a stake in the U.S. stock market has dropped dramatically. Today, with apps like Raenest, you can own shares in Apple, Tesla, Google, Nvidia, Amazon, and more with as little as $2, and enjoy one commission-free stock purchase every month. 

The platform gives you access to over 4,000 U.S stocks and ETFs, with payments, transfers, and investments all managed in one place. And because knowing what to do with a portfolio is often harder than building one, Raenest includes AI-powered performance summaries that translate your portfolio data into clear, readable insights, showing you how your portfolio is performing and where opportunities might be worth a closer look. 

That said, it’s important to note that none of this happened suddenly. The road from closed trading floors to AI-assisted investing on your phone is a longer one than it might appear. To understand why AI's role in investing matters, it helps to understand how the market got here.

A Brief History of Stock Market Investing

In the early days of organised stock trading, access was largely mediated through brokers and financial institutions. The foundations of the modern U.S. stock market were established with the 1792 Buttonwood Agreement, which eventually evolved into the New York Stock Exchange. For much of the market's history, investing was expensive, information travelled slowly, and individual investors had few practical ways to participate directly. Trading commissions were high, market data was difficult to obtain, and executing a trade often required working through a full-service broker.

A major shift occurred in 1975 when the United States deregulated fixed brokerage commissions. The change opened the door for discount brokerages such as Charles Schwab, which offered investors a lower-cost alternative to traditional brokerage services. While investing was still far from frictionless, the cost of entering the market began to decline.

The rise of the internet accelerated this transformation. During the 1990s, online brokerage platforms enabled investors to place trades directly from their computers, reducing costs and dramatically increasing execution speed. Tasks that once required phone calls and paperwork could now be completed in minutes, bringing the stock market closer to everyday investors.

The next major leap came with smartphones. Mobile investing apps made it possible to monitor portfolios and place trades from virtually anywhere. Platforms such as Robinhood helped popularise commission-free trading in the United States, while growing competition pushed much of the industry toward similar pricing models. Fractional investing further lowered the barrier to entry by allowing investors to buy fractional shares rather than whole shares, making high-priced stocks accessible to investors with smaller amounts of capital.

Each stage of this evolution reduced a different barrier to participation. First it was access, then cost, then convenience. Today, artificial intelligence is beginning to address another longstanding challenge: analysis. AI-powered tools are increasingly making sophisticated analysis, data processing, and investment research available to individual investors, narrowing a gap that has historically favoured large institutions. Here are six ways AI is reshaping stock market investing today.

🔗Also read: Stock market terms every investor should know.

6 Ways AI Is Reshaping Stock Market Investing

1. Making Investment Research Faster and Easier to Navigate

Before an investor can decide whether a stock is worth buying, they first need information. That information is often scattered across earnings reports, regulatory filings, company presentations, analyst notes, economic data releases, and a constant stream of market news.

Traditionally, gathering and reviewing these materials required significant time and resources. Large investment firms often relied on teams of analysts dedicated to monitoring specific industries and companies.

AI is helping to streamline that process. Modern tools can quickly scan lengthy financial documents, summarise key findings, highlight important disclosures, and organise information from multiple sources into a more accessible format. Instead of spending hours searching for relevant information, investors can focus more of their attention on evaluating the opportunities and risks in front of them.

2. Helping Investors Make Sense of Growing Volumes of Data

Gathering information is only one part of the investing process. Once investors have access to earnings reports, market updates, economic data, and company disclosures, they still need to determine what that information actually means.

This is where AI's analytical capabilities become particularly valuable. Rather than simply collecting information, machine learning models can examine large datasets, identify recurring patterns, uncover relationships between market events, and highlight trends that might otherwise go unnoticed. For example, AI can analyse how certain economic indicators have historically affected specific sectors or identify behavioural patterns that emerge before periods of increased market volatility.

By helping investors connect information that might otherwise remain scattered across thousands of data points, AI is making market analysis faster, more comprehensive, and increasingly accessible to a wider range of participants.

🔗ICYMI, here’s how to pick your first stock.

3. Making Investing More Automated and Consistent

Finding information and understanding it are important parts of investing, but they are only useful if they lead to action. One of the most persistent challenges investors face is maintaining consistency. Many investment plans are straightforward in theory, yet difficult to follow in practice. Market volatility, busy schedules, and emotional decision-making can all make it harder for investors to stick to long-term goals.

AI and automation are increasingly helping address this challenge. Rather than requiring investors to monitor the market constantly or manually execute every transaction, modern investing platforms can automate parts of the investment process based on predefined preferences and goals. This allows investors to spend less time managing routine tasks while maintaining a more disciplined approach to investing.

The impact of this shift is already visible on Raenest. For example, investors can use Auto-Invest to purchase U.S stocks and ETFs on a weekly or monthly schedule. Instead of deciding when to invest each month or remembering to place the same trades repeatedly, investors can create a plan once and let it run automatically.

By investing a fixed amount on a regular schedule, regardless of market conditions, investors can gradually build positions over time without constantly worrying about when to buy. This approach, known as dollar-cost averaging, has remained popular for decades because it shifts the focus away from trying to perfectly time the market and towards building a consistent investing habit. Over time, that consistency can help smooth out the impact of short-term market fluctuations while reducing some of the emotions that often influence investment decisions.

If staying consistent has been one of your biggest investing challenges, Auto-Invest on Raenest can help turn that intention into a routine. Try it out today. 

4. Narrowing the Gap Between Retail and Institutional Investors

The growing availability of AI-powered tools is also changing the balance between individual and professional investors. For decades, large asset managers and hedge funds benefited from proprietary research systems, advanced analytics, and extensive financial resources that gave them a significant informational advantage.

While institutions still possess substantial advantages, the gap is becoming less pronounced than it once was. Through cloud-based platforms and AI-driven software, individual investors can now access sophisticated screening tools, portfolio analytics, and research capabilities that were previously associated with professional investment teams. The result is a market in which access to quality information is becoming increasingly widespread.

5. Influencing Where Investor Attention Flows

AI is changing more than the tools investors use. It is also shaping the companies and sectors attracting the most attention from the market.

As businesses race to develop and deploy artificial intelligence technologies, investors have increasingly focused on the infrastructure supporting that growth. Semiconductor manufacturers, cloud computing providers, data centre operators, and AI software companies have all become central players in the investment conversation. 

In this way, artificial intelligence has evolved beyond a tool for investing and become one of the most important themes influencing investment decisions.

6. Personalising the Investing Experience

Not every investor has the same financial goals, risk tolerance, or investment horizon. Historically, personalised investment guidance was often associated with private wealth management services and financial advisors.

AI is helping make a more tailored investing experience available at a much broader scale. Modern investing platforms can analyse user preferences, investment behaviour, and financial objectives to deliver more relevant insights, recommendations, and educational content. Rather than presenting every investor with the same information, these systems can adapt to individual needs and priorities.

As these capabilities continue to develop, investing is likely to become increasingly personalised. Investors will have greater access to tools that align with their specific goals, helping them make decisions that are more relevant to their circumstances rather than relying solely on one-size-fits-all approaches.

Final Thoughts: Will AI Replace Human Judgement in Investing?

This is a reasonable question, and one that comes up often as AI tools become more embedded in how markets function. The short answer is no, but the longer answer is more interesting.

As we’ve seen, AI is good at processing large volumes of data quickly, identifying patterns across complex variables, and executing decisions without the emotional interference that tends to cost people money at the worst possible moments. Those are real advantages, and they’re not trivial. But investing is not purely a data problem. It involves judgement calls about risk tolerance, life goals, values, and timing that are deeply personal and resistant to full automation. An algorithm can tell you that a stock is statistically undervalued. It cannot tell you whether taking on that position is the right move given your specific financial situation, your obligations, or how you would actually feel watching it drop 30 percent before it recovers.

What AI is doing, more accurately, is changing what investors need to be good at. The part of investing that required grinding through data, screening hundreds of options, or staying glued to a news feed is increasingly handled by tools. The part that requires clarity about your own goals, discipline during volatility, and long-term thinking is still entirely human. If anything, AI frees up more cognitive space for that latter kind of thinking by handling the mechanical work underneath it.

With this understanding, the investors who navigate this era well will not be the ones who hand everything over to an algorithm, nor the ones who ignore these tools entirely. They’ll be the ones who stay curious, stay informed, and use every available advantage to make better decisions over time. If you’re ready to start, Raenest lets you invest in over 4,000 U.S stocks and ETFs from as little as $2.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How is AI used in the stock market?

AI is used in the stock market to analyse large volumes of financial data in real time, identify patterns across historical and live market behaviour, execute algorithmic trades, assess portfolio risk, and generate personalised investment insights. Institutional investors have used AI-driven tools for decades, but they are now widely available to retail investors through consumer platforms.

2. Can AI predict the stock market?

AI cannot predict the stock market with certainty. What it can do is analyse historical patterns, monitor real-time signals, and provide probabilistic assessments of likely market behaviour based on available data. It is better understood as a well-informed reading of conditions rather than a guarantee of outcomes.

3. Is AI better than human judgement in investing?

AI outperforms human judgement in tasks involving speed, data processing, and emotional consistency. It does not account for personal goals, values, or the contextual factors that shape individual financial decisions. The two work better in combination: AI handles the analytical heavy lifting while human judgement governs the decisions that depend on personal circumstance and long-term thinking.

4. Can I invest in U.S stocks from Nigeria?

Yes. Raenest allow investors in Nigeria to buy U.S stocks and ETFs directly from their phones. You get access to over 4,000 US stocks and ETFs, one commission-free stock purchase every month, and AI-powered performance summaries to help you manage your portfolio over time.

5. Do I need a lot of money to start investing in stocks?

No. Fractional shares have made it possible to own a portion of high-value stocks without needing to buy a full share. On Raenest, you can start investing with as little as $2, which removes the price of a single share in a major company as a barrier to entry.

6. What is algorithmic trading?

Algorithmic trading is the use of computer programmes to execute trades automatically based on predefined conditions such as price movements, volume thresholds, or timing signals. Modern algorithmic trading incorporates machine learning, meaning the underlying models can adapt to new market conditions rather than following a fixed set of rules.

7. What is a robo-advisor?

A robo-advisor is an AI-driven platform that builds and manages an investment portfolio on your behalf based on your financial goals, risk tolerance, and timeline. It rebalances your portfolio automatically in response to market changes and typically charges lower fees than a traditional human financial advisor.

Sources

• https://www.nyse.com/history-of-nyse
• https://www.encyclopedia.com/economics/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/investing-online
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Stock_Brokerage_Commission_Deregulation

Disclaimer: Raenest is not a broker-dealer, investment adviser or member of FINRA. Securities offered by Alpaca Securities LLC ("Alpaca Securities"). Alpaca Securities is a member of FINRA and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Raenest does not recommend any specific securities or investment strategies. Investing involves risk & investments may lose value, including the loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Investors should consider their investment objectives and risks carefully before investing. U.S. stock investments are held with Alpaca Securities LLC, a U.S.-licensed broker-dealer regulated by the SEC and FINRA. Your assets are custodied under strict regulatory and security standards, and you retain full visibility into your holdings and performance at all times. Investment feature is offered in partnership with City Investment Capital Limited, a firm licensed by the Securities and Exchange Commission of Nigeria.