If you haven’t ever used the application Wish, you have probably seen adds passing by on social media. In these adds, famous football players unpack tens of boxes from Wish, all containing cool gadgets which are relatively cheap. But have you ever ordered something yourself? Well I did. And the first product I received was so beneath my exceptions I threw it away.

For the uninformed, a short summary on Wish. The application Wish offers a digital platform which connects manufacturers, mainly situated in Asia, with the world of smartphone users. The user can scroll through lists of products which are all heavily discounted. So how are they able to offer these products at such high discounts?

First, we recently all learned that through digital platforms, products are offered for lower prices compared to traditional stores. The disappearance of middleman, which incurs costs, offers the possibility to offer discounts. Second, the manufacturing costs within Asian countries are substantially lower compared to western countries. Third, Wish misleads users by giving a wrong perspective of the discounts received. For example, Whish presents the customer with a picture of a Bose Bluetooth speaker with a 98% discount. The price is just €20,- compared to a speaker of €872,-. However, when you open the description you see the specification of the speaker, except for the name Bose. The reason is that the speaker you will receive most likely is a fake. There is a large possibility that the speaker will stop working within 2 weeks and you threw away €20,-. Buying products from Wish is a lottery as you never know exactly what you will receive at home.

So how come certain people keep ordering products on Wish even though the product uncertainty is fairly high? I assume one reason is the marketing of Wish. Using famous football players in their latest campaign heightens trust in the platform. But the main reason Is probably because the products really are a bargain. People know the quality is low and that products are fake. However, the price is so low they have no problem accepting it.

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Do Shoppers Know The Truth Behind Wish?

Imagine you’re planning on investing your money on the stock market. Before purchasing any stock, you want to gather enough information about which stock is reliable and worth your money. This personal touch depends on the information available and your interpretation of it. To create an opinion time is needed. But is this information up-to-date? Do you interpret the data correctly? Now Imagine someone who does it for you and makes this decision in a second instead of 2-3 days. Wouldn’t that be great?

Roughly a decade ago the stock market started losing its human touch by the introduction of algorithms run by computers. Using algorithms, tremendous amounts of calculations could be computed which predicted future stock behaviour within little time. A term flash-trading was introduced which referred to these programs buying/selling stocks every second.
In recent years the development of artificial intelligence has been branded as the next investing oracle. Goldman Sachs alone had 831 job listings in search of programmers or big data specialists[1]. Artificial Intelligence is able to gather and analyse more data and it applies machine learning. Currently owning an infrastructure capable for running artificial intelligence and machine learning requires a large investment. But as the costs of hardware keep falling, artificial intelligence will be easily accessible for all[2].

But how do we stay ahead if artificial intelligence programs become available for all? By fully relying on these prediction machines, the stock market is at risk of losing competitive advantages and innovation. Even one of the most innovative men, Elon Musk, claimed robot involvement within Tesla had gotten out of hand and humans had to be brought back[3].

A perfect explanation of machine imperfection is given by Joshua Gans a professor at the university of Toronto[4]. US air-force planes were often shot down during bombing flights. To prevent planes from being shot down, the planes could be reinforced. However reinforcing every part would make the plane too heavy. Would the solution be to reinforce area’s which were hit most? Abraham Wild, an famous statistician, told the US Air force the opposite. Reinforce the parts which are least damaged. These probably are area’s hit of planes who do not return. Machines cannot react on data they never received from the planes which were shot down. Such a decision would be highly counterintuitive for a computer.

To conclude, the possibilities of stock market prediction using artificial intelligence are enormous and extremely beneficial. No human could ever process that amount of data in such a short time. However, the risk remains a machine can miss critical data which seems random or which it does not receive. A humans touch on algorithms run by machine still seems to be the competitive advantage in the stock market industry.

Would you fully rely on artificial intelligence to run? Or do you believe human touch is key to gain a competitive advantage?

Sources:
[1],[3],[4]https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ai-will-change-stock-market-trading-but-it-cant-wipe-out-the-role-of-people- 2018-05-15
[2]https://www.itprotoday.com/machine-learning/how-ai-trading-systems-will-shake-wall-street