Loading signal…
From telegraph wire to AI nanoseconds.
Two hundred and twenty-five years of market-moving information, compressed into six eras — the telegraph wire, the radio, the Bloomberg terminal, the blog, the tweet, the algorithm. Each faster than the last. Each less accountable than the last.
Financial news traveled by telegraph wire then printed in morning papers. A London statement took 3 days to reach New York traders. Information was scarce and power concentrated in those who had it first.
Radio and ticker tape compressed reaction from days to hours. Presidential speeches could move markets the same afternoon. The financial pundit was born.
CNBC launched 1989. Bloomberg terminals hit floors in 1982. Financial commentators could move markets in real-time. The era of the unchecked prediction began.
Message boards, blogs, early Twitter democratized financial commentary. Anyone with an audience could move a market. The pump-and-dump went digital.
A single Musk tweet could move Bitcoin 15% before most people read it. Algorithms scraped Twitter in real-time and executed trades faster than human cognition.
AI systems scrape Truth Social, X, newswires and execute trades in nanoseconds. The information-to-execution loop is now entirely non-human.
Each bar is drawn on a log scale — the relative intensity of that era against the others. On a linear scale, the earliest eras would disappear into a single pixel next to the most recent ones.