When Joseph Plazo stepped onto the TEDx stage, the audience expected another polished talk about markets and innovation. What they got instead was a startling revelation: human traders haven’t been driving price action for a decade—algorithms have.
Speaking through the lens of Plazo Sullivan Roche Capital, Plazo revealed that institutions quietly rewrote their execution protocols between 2013 and 2023, enabling machines to replace humans at every critical touchpoint.
The Silent Extinction of Manual Trading
He explained that the traditional trader—the one analyzing charts and making judgment calls—has been replaced by execution models capable of scanning millions of data points in microseconds.
The Institutional Motive Behind Automation
He explained that emotion, fatigue, hesitation, and bias are liabilities in a world where markets move in milliseconds.
From Simple Bots to Market-Shaping Systems
Plazo highlighted how algorithms evolved from simple automated tools into entire ecosystems capable of liquidity discovery, sentiment analysis, arbitrage, and predictive modeling.
4. Retail Traders Are Competing With Supercomputers
He warned that manual trading without understanding algorithmic behavior is like “bringing a wooden spear to a drone fight.”
5. The TEDx Message That Hit Hard
As Joseph Plazo concluded, he left the crowd with a message that resonated long after the applause faded:
“Human intuition isn’t dead. But in today’s markets, intuition must be paired with algorithmic understanding—or it will be crushed by it.”
His TEDx talk didn’t just explain the last decade of read more change—it armed the public with the truth behind modern trading.
And for many, it was the wake-up call they never saw coming.