We have all seen highly realistic videos showing people placed in unreal situations. Words appear in voices that are not their own. Actions seem real but are not. All of this is the work of artificial intelligence. The line between the unreal and the real is becoming harder to draw.
AI is now entering financial markets as well. Market analysis is one area seeing steady disruption. A growing concern among analysts is whether machines will replace them. That concern is increasingly grounded in reality.
Markets consist of investors who interact with one another to seek gains. In theory, those decisions remain rational. In practice, they rarely are. In Forecasting Financial Markets, Tony Plummer showed that as trends extend, investor and trader behaviour turns increasingly non-rational. He detailed how herd behaviour shapes decision-making and how it can end in market excesses or collapses. History offers repeated examples of manias and deep depressions.
These studies rely on market data from the past century. Today’s market structure is different. The key change lies in how information reaches investors, how they interpret it and how they act on it. As technology penetrated markets, this process began to change. That shift is now accelerating.
Markets are entering a phase of rapid technological advance. The gap between data availability and its analysis continues to narrow. Each day reduces the time needed to convert information into action.
