Crowd competence for investment banking

Five years ago, the Adaptive Knowledge Representation and Reasoning conference (AKRR 2008) took place. The conference program included a special session on creativity and innovation. Sakari Virkki gave an interesting and thought provoking talk related to investment banking. He described his system that had every year outperformed Standard & Poor's 500 stock market index. The system is based on crowdsourcing in such a manner that all members of the community are not considered equally important but their competence is carefully analyzed by the system.

The latest version of the system has mapped and ranked the activity of 10,000 investors and 30,000 instruments at work in US stock exchanges.

After 2008, Virkki has joined forces with the economist Akseli Virtanen to establish Robin Hood Asset Management Cooperative. Huffington Post published recently an article describing Robin Hood as a means to introduce altruism to investment banking. It is clear that the economical system is currently overly centralized. Virkki's system potentially offers an important solution for repairing some main defects in the current capitalistic system without sacrificing the essential strengths of market economy.