Career lessonCase studyCareersMarketsArtificial intelligence
A skill is only worth what the market structure around it allows
Floored · 2009
The idea
Floored follows Chicago pit traders as electronic markets take their living away. The skills were real: reading a crowd, pricing in seconds, holding a position through noise. They were valuable because the market structure needed humans in a pit, and when the structure changed the skills were worth nothing in that form. This is not a historical question. Every job in finance is a skill wrapped in a market structure, and the structure can change faster than the skill can be rebuilt. The useful response is to know which part of what you do is the skill and which part is the structure.
Separate what you can do from the structure that makes it valuable, and watch the structure.
When it works
Choosing a seat, judging the effect of automation on a role, or answering what AI changes about an analyst job.
When it may fail
Structures also create new skills as they remove old ones; the electronic market that emptied the pits created quant desks. The film shows the loss, not the replacement.
How to use it
For the role you want, write two lists: what the work requires of a person, and what about the current market makes that scarce. Then ask which items on the second list a tool or a rule change could remove.
Where it came from
Documentary Floored · 2009
What the source says. Chicago pit traders as electronic markets take their living away: the best film on what happens to a skill when the market structure that made it valuable disappears.
Competing perspectives
Argues against
Coding is a task and innovation is the purpose: automate the task, keep the jobName the purpose of a job separately from its tasks; automation changes the tasks and leaves the purpose to be done better or worse.
Connected ideas
Says something similar
Which parts of the analyst job compress, and which get more valuablePrepare for the parts of the job the tools make scarce, judgement and client sense, rather than the parts they make cheap.
Says something similar
Breadth beats early specialisation in unpredictable fieldsIn a field where the rules keep changing, a late specialist with range usually outlasts an early one without it.
Concepts
Put it to work on L3VLUP
More like this
- TechniqueArtificial intelligenceVideo located
A prompt is a brief: task, role, background and output format
Write to a model as you would brief a capable junior: the task, their role, the context they lack, and what the output should look like.
From Prompting 101 · Anthropic
- Company insightArtificial intelligenceVideo located
What banks actually deploy is narrower and more governed than the consumer conversation
Institutional AI is scoped, governed and data-limited; expect to work inside those limits and to be able to explain them.
From Goldman CIO Marco Argenti on the Warp-Speed Improvements in AI · Bloomberg Odd Lots
- FrameworkCrises and market historyBook
A bubble needs marketability, money and credit, and speculation together
Check all three legs, marketability, cheap money and a population buying for resale, before calling something a bubble.
From Boom and Bust · William Quinn and John D. Turner
- FrameworkInvestingFilm
A cheap measurable signal beats an expensive intuitive one at scale
The market misprices what is hard to measure, so a consistent cheap signal can beat an expensive expert.
From Moneyball · 2011