Market Intelligence — Perspective
The Democratisation of Market Intelligence
Sentiment has always been human. Now, for the first time, the tools to act on it are available to everyone — a case for why the future of equity research belongs to those willing to share it openly.
I. Origins
The Tool That Changed Everything
In late 2025, Peter Steinberger released OpenClaw — an open-source autonomous agent that connects to your messaging apps, integrates with leading AI models, and maintains persistent memory across sessions. Not a chatbot. An execution shell that acts on your behalf, continuously, in the background. Institutions called it a security nightmare. In the open, people are building financial intelligence layers on top of it anyway. Despite near-term security concerns, in my view, proliferation into the greater financial community is only a matter of time.
II. A Personal Reckoning
The Distribution Edge
Equities research produced by banks and brokers has historically been the purview of institutional investors, gated behind closed garden portals only accessible to a select few. Open equities research is publicly available to all. With bots from both institutional and retail processing the research into their LLMs, open research will drive a disproportionately larger part of overall market sentiment. Distribution is the new edge.
Figure 2 · Information Flow Model Comparison
Then
Prior Flow Model
Now
Future Flow Model
Twenty Years, One Decision
After two decades in institutional equities, I've decided to move from the sell-side to build an open research platform. The sell-side's edge was logistical more so than anything else. They were the loudest voice to market, feeding sentiment to institutional investors who drove market flows. With the change of market drivers augmented by the democratisation of agentic AI, this is all changing.
Using tools like Claude Code and OpenClaw, I built a full autonomous agent in three weeks — persistent memory, live watchlist, accessible anywhere via Telegram. It never sleeps. Neither does the market.
Figure 1 · Daily Turnover Composition · % of Value
ASX Equity Turnover — Strategy & Investor Type
Model note: No regulator or exchange publishes this exact five-way split. 2013e is a historical reconstruction; 2025e combines completed full-year turnover and ETF inputs with older HFT and retail proxies plus explicit assumptions; 2030e is a base-case scenario. Institutional Non-HFT is calculated as the residual.
Sources: ASIC REP 331; ASIC REP 597; ASIC 2025 quarterly equity-market data; ASIC retail investor trading study (2020); ASIC trading systems and automated trading update (2025); ASX 2025 settlement calendar; Betashares 2025 ETF data; Vanguard Australia ETF index-tracking data. Download the full estimation framework, source register and sensitivities (XLSX).
Homodeus research is designed to be consumed by the entire active market - retail as well as institution. Our ground-up, agentic-friendly platform also allows our research to be read by bots as easily as humans, unlike legacy PDF-first research platforms.
In partnership with Sharewise, Homodeus Research has a retail distribution network of over 70k retail and high-net-worth clients.
III. The Structural Shifts
i. The Passive Evolution
In the US passive funds AUM crossed above active for the first time in 2024 — and the gap keeps widening. This trend has also been observed in Australia.
Figure 3 · Active vs. Passive Share of Fund Assets — Comparative
US & Australia: The Passive Migration, 2014–2025
United States
Passive assets ($19.1T) surpassed active ($16.2T) for the first time in 2024. Active funds have seen net outflows every year since 2014.
Australia (ASX + CBOE)
Active still dominates by AUM, but passive captured 74% of all 2025 ETF flows. Total ETF industry: AUD $330.6Bn (+34% YoY). Passive had net inflows in 23 of 24 consecutive quarters.
US sources: Morningstar Fund Flow Data (Oct 2025); ICI Investment Company Fact Book 2025; Hartford Funds (Feb 2025).[1,2,3] · AU sources: Morningstar Australia Quarterly Fund Review (Dec 2025); Betashares Annual ETF Review 2025; S&P/ASX 25 Years of Indices Report (2025).[AU1,AU2,AU3]
ii. The Volatility Conundrum
As trading has progressively moved from active to passive, this has amplified market signals creating larger volatility in market moves.
Figure 4 · Earnings Day Price Reactions
Illustrative Average Absolute Single-Day Move on Earnings — S&P 500 Stocks, 2017–2025
Sources: SSRN "Earnings Announcement Volatility as a Market Advancement Indicator" (Kunehepon, 2024); S&P Dow Jones Indices US Equities Market Attributes 2025.[7,8]
iii. The Sentiment Driver - Human in the Loop
Algorithms now drive most equity volume — but the signal is still human. Management tone, analyst views, social media. With the shift from active to passive, the growth of systematic trading doesn't diminish human opinion. It amplifies it.
Figure 5 · Systematic & Algorithmic Trading Growth
Estimated Algorithmic Trading Market Size (USD Bn) & US Equity Volume Share
Sources: Grand View Research Algorithmic Trading Market Report 2024; QuantifiedStrategies.com (Select USA data); Allied Market Research (2024).[4,5,6]
IV. Synthesis
Why Open Research Wins
AI interpretation of numbers and sentiment will all but displace human analysis, but sentiment generation at its core is still human in the loop. With the proliferation of open source agentic AI (OpenClaw), algorithmic trading (both quant and sentiment) will become mainstream tools. Not just those used by institutional investors. Open research which is made publicly available and easily accessible to bots will have a disproportionately larger impact on market sentiment vs. traditional research produced by brokers, which have only been accessible to insititutional investors.
In the age of agentic AI, widely distributed human opinion is the most powerful input to price formation. Open research feeds everyone's models. With macro indsutry trends driving ever larger market volatility having the appropriate messaging being widely disseminated is more critical than ever to ensure markets are properly capturing the value of your business.