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
Plazo began by describing how, a decade ago, traders still stood behind screens and made real-time decisions. Today, he noted, those decisions have been delegated to algorithms designed to operate thousands of times faster.
The Institutional Motive Behind Automation
Plazo made it clear: hedge funds replaced humans not because humans were wrong—but because humans were slow.
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.”
The Final Truth Joseph Plazo Left Behind
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 change—it armed the public website with the truth behind modern trading.
And for many, it was the wake-up call they never saw coming.