Thought Dump -
I think I am extremely early to this trend:
1) All white collar workers will eventually turn into the stock market to make money.
2) Financial analysts will now find it more important than ever to train "Portfolio Management" skills like market sense, rather than "how many hours you put in, and how well you 'analyze the company'"
On Point 1:
Anthropic will just do the same for literally every white collar job they can think of. They did it for finance / consulting because it's the largest most obvious TAM that can be replaced; the lushest green field if you will
AI is good at coding because it's built by coders. Now they're hiring finance people to make it good at finance. Then they'll go after HR, Compliance - all ruthlessly decimated
Now where will all these people go? Historically there are 3 ways to make money:
1. Labor - Working a job
2. Capital - Making your money work for you
3. Rent - Used to be "owning land", now it's owning businesses, etc.
Now, if you remove 1. Let's just say a very low number, like 1% of the white collar world gets removed. White collar workers earn roughly $82 K/year on average, and there are around 70m professionals - 1% of that throwing their entire income would be $57 bn into markets. Right now the market receives $550 bn from retail (on average); so basically it's something like 10% of the world throwing their $$ in. Also accounting for savings, it's maybe like 20%.
Anyways this is all napkin math, you get the point. It's already happening, more and more people will basically start wanting to own stocks, to own assets, to do options 2 & 3
I don't know how it ends, but short term, flows to the market will be immense (and we're already seeing it right now)
2) Writing this because I'm an analyst - I can see my job just being replaced by AI. My value no longer comes from how well I do the analyst or how well I know the name. Why do I have to know the names like the back of the hand, when I can just ask AI - sure it takes like 10 seconds more, but in return we can store data across thousands of tickers
No, my value comes in my market sense, and basically "juju about the market". And so in a way investing / trading going to be more art than science. Here's an example:
Boss: "Why should I buy stock XYZ despite its numbers being so shit? Everyone is using AI and coming to the same conclusion"
Analyst: "Well, you can't argue with Mr Market ser. That's the thing - everyone is seeing the same numbers, coming to the same conclusion, yet stock is up 10% today. That in itself is a good reason to buy, when the force of the move denies all rational explanation we missed something. The thesis lies in more memetic areas than anything"
Boss: "You're f*cking stupid! Why did I hire such a retard analyst when AI can replace you"
Next Day
Boss: "Why is the stock up another 20% today??? I DON'T GET IT MARKET IS NOT RATIONAL"
Analyst: "Do you want to make money, or do you want to be rich?"
Anyways this was a tad bit overdramatic but again, you get the point. We're basically getting pre-fundamental style era trading again, and I'm all for it. Again, we're already seeing it happening in traditional markets right now - look at all the meme stocks, all the small caps pumping. It's a crazy world.