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Financial Advisors Must Bet on the Team. Not the Product.
July 28, 2026
By William Lee, former CME/CBOT rate futures trader and founder of Great White Financial.
For decades I watched technology chew through products and services like they were disposable. The systems I traded on at the CME are relics now. The software that ran a serious fund ten years ago would not get you in the door today.
That taught me something I tell every advisor who will listen. Do not bet on the product. Bet on the team.
Products expire. Services get commoditized. The edge you built this year becomes the baseline next year. But people who can see the change coming and move with it, that is the asset that compounds. And with AI, the change no longer arrives by the decade. It arrives by the week.
When the ground moves that fast, the product is what breaks. The team is what adapts.
So when you decide where to put your trust, your capital, and your time, look past the tool in the demo. Look at who is holding it. Technology will replace the product five times over before it replaces a team that knows how to build the next one.
Which brings me to time itself. Because AI is not only changing what we make. It is changing how fast the clock runs. I wrote about that over at Mixed Market Artist, and I want to share it with you here.
Originally published at Mixed Market Artist, the market commentary journal of William Lee. Shared here with the author’s permission.
Changes: Time Travel With AI Is Already Happening
In living many decades now, and after witnessing an information technology explosion in my lifetime, I can say that time is truly relative. In perhaps the most vulgar description of Einstein’s theory of relativity, Einstein said:
When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.
A. Einstein
Artificial intelligence is bending time. We can do the work of more and more in less and less time.
As someone who works in venture capital and quantitative analysis, I can see the time seem to pass more rapidly as we check off six months of executable tasks in the space of a week.
Time Management Reigns Supreme
They lied to you. Cash is not King. Time is King.
At my incubator, we believe in simplicity and taking small sensible steps quickly. This is the formula that controls risk and keeps you competitive. Like the jab step in basketball, this approach is more crucial than ever.
In our venture capital blog, we wrote about a strategy adapted from an article discussing sports psychology, “Businesses Break Free from the All-or-Nothing Mindset.”
With AI, are you time travelling forward or backward? Is time slowing down or moving faster?
In large part, it depends on your mindset. If you can get six months of work done in a week, have you sped up the clock to six months in the future, or has the week moved so slowly that you were able to get six months of work done?
The idea that you have achieved so much in a small time period, if you are making good decisions, seems to be the favorable mindset.
If you extrapolate, it is like becoming a businessman with the skillset of your ten-year-later future self in just one year’s time. Doors are opening and time is expanding.
How you want to view it may be up to you in the moment, whether you want to feel like you are leaping into the future or bringing your future self to the here and now. Either way, try to enjoy the journey. You might want to wear a seat belt.
About the Author
Billy Lee, CEO of Great White Financial, is a sportsman, businessman, artist, speaker, writer, and producer. Billy is the founder of the Wellness Institute for Economic Growth and Kairos Athletics.
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This material has been distributed for informational purposes only and should not be considered as investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, strategy, or investment product. Information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but not guaranteed. Article ©2026 Mixed Market Artist, republished with permission.
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