I've held this opinion for a while and never said it out loud: software engineers, on average, should be better investors than finance MBAs. Not because of some secret knowledge. Because of the mental tooling we already have from building software.
Nobody talks about this. The finance world markets itself as a priesthood — specialized vocabulary, opaque jargon, Bloomberg terminals that cost $25k/year. But when you actually sit down with company financials, you realize: this is just a system with inputs, outputs, and feedback loops. Engineers are unusually good at reasoning about those.
What engineers actually do well
Tolerating uncertainty. Every software project ships with incomplete specs. You learn to make decisions with 60% of the information you wish you had. Most retail investors freeze when they don't have certainty. Experienced engineers already know certainty is a myth.
Thinking in systems. Revenue, cost structure, moat, competitive dynamics — these aren't that different from reading a distributed system's architecture. You learn to ask "where does this break?" and "what's the feedback loop here?" Those questions map almost directly to "where is this business exposed?" and "what happens when growth slows?"
First-principles reasoning. Engineers are trained to distrust black boxes. When I look at a company's P/E ratio, I don't accept it as a verdict. I ask: what's priced in here? What are the assumptions? This is just debugging.
Reading documentation. Annual reports (10-Ks) are long and boring. But engineers read dense technical documentation all the time. 10-Ks are honestly easier than most API docs.
Where engineers fail (and why)
The failure mode is overconfidence about specific calls. Engineers love finding the clever edge case. But the market isn't a bug to exploit — it's a system where millions of smart people are also looking for the same edge cases. The moat isn't in being smart. It's in being patient and systematic.
The other failure: ignoring the emotional component. Markets aren't deterministic. They're sociotechnical systems where sentiment matters as much as fundamentals for months at a time. That's uncomfortable for engineers trained to reason about what should happen.
The actual tool gap
Here's the honest problem: most financial analysis tools were built for finance people. They either cost a fortune, require institutional access, or are wrapped in UI so bad it looks like it was designed in 2003.
I got frustrated enough with this that I built pomegra.io — a free tool to run proper fundamental analysis without needing a Bloomberg terminal or a finance degree. P/E, EV/EBITDA, DCF, margin trends. Clean, instant, free. The kind of thing I wish had existed when I started paying attention to where my money was going.
The real point
I'm not saying engineers should YOLO their savings into individual stocks. I'm saying the skills gap between "technically capable of evaluating a business" and "thinks investing is too complex for them" is mostly a confidence and tooling problem, not an actual skill deficit.
Finance isn't a different discipline. It's systems thinking with money at stake. We do harder things every day.
Start reading one 10-K. Pick a company you know well — ideally one in your industry. Notice how much of the analysis is just reading carefully and thinking clearly. You'll see what I mean.
