Yesterday, I watched this talk by Armin Steuernagel, the co-founder of Purpose Foundation, in which he speaks about steward-ownership, a new way of thinking about company ownership.
It's a great concept, and I'll definitely explore it in the coming days. However, what struck me was something he says five minutes into his talk.
Steuernagel affirms that supercomputers and algorithms do 99% of the tradings on stock markets today.
So, this morning I woke up with that staggering "99%" in mind, and I couldn't help but search more about it, even if that means I'll have less time to write.
In this 2018 article from CNN, they say that "on a typical trading day, computers account for 50% to 60% of market trades, according to Art Hogan, chief market strategist for B. Riley FBR. When the markets are extremely volatile, they can make up 90% of trades."
And that was 2018.
This other 2019 article from The Economist states that "the stockmarket is now run by computers, algorithms and passive managers."
So, Steuernagel is right. Supercomputers and algorithms run the stock markets. The thing is, those machine-controlled tradings define the strategies of many big companies that, in turn, affect the lives of many people. And then we wonder how the world could be so inhuman.