As work and technology become increasingly roboticized (and we’re still far away from The Singularity) the corollary becomes clearer that we need humans for the squishy stuff. Feelings. Communication, management, judgment calls. Except for the stock market, right? Stocks are math! The WallStreetBets hullabaloo exposes the lie that Wall Street is entirely fueled by pure raw math.
Humans have been cut out of stock market math for decades. Computers calculate and act faster and more accurately than humans ever could. So why are so many humans still employed in the financial sector? Feelings. The various funds may be a way to hide it but the math and the market movement give us feelings and we need other humans to help us make sense of them.
Now we have millions of individual investors openly picking stocks because feelings. It’s creating such an uproar not because it breaks the big funds’ monopoly on the math but because it breaks their monopoly on managing feelings.
Liz Welsh 