Everyone expected triumph. But what happened instead left the audience reeling.

In the sunlit academic halls of UP Diliman, Asia’s brightest students—engineers, economists, AI researchers—converged to explore the future of investing through algorithms.

They expected Plazo to hand them a blueprint to machine-driven wealth.
They were wrong.

---

### The Sentence That Changed the Room

Joseph Plazo is no stranger to accolades.

The moment he began speaking, the room quieted.

“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it when not to try.”

The murmurs stopped.

It challenged everything the crowd believed.

---

### A Lecture or a Lament?

Plazo didn’t pitch software.
He projected mistakes— neural nets falling apart under real-world pressure.

“Most models,” he said, “are just statistical mirrors of the past.

Then, with a pause that felt like a punch, he asked:

“ Can it compute the panic of dominoes falling on Wall Street? Not the charts. The *emotion*.”

The silence became the answer.

---

### The Smartest Students in Asia Push Back

Of course, the audience pushed back.

A PhD student from Kyoto noted how large language models now detect emotion in text.

Plazo nodded. “Feeling isn’t forecasting.”

A data scientist from HKUST proposed that probabilistic models could one day simulate conviction.

Plazo’s reply was metaphorical:
“You can simulate weather. But conviction? That’s lightning. You can’t forecast where it’ll strike. Only feel when it does.”

---

### When Faith Replaces Thinking

His fear isn’t code—it’s the cult.

“Some traders no longer read. No longer think. They just wait for signals.”

But he’s not anti-AI. Far from it.

His company’s systems scan sentiment, order flow, more info and liquidity.
“But every output is double-checked by human eyes.”

Then came the killer line:
“‘The model told me to do it.’ That’s what we’ll hear after every disaster in the next decade.”

---

### Asia’s Enthusiasm, Interrupted

Nowhere does AI have more believers than Asia.

Dr. Anton Leung, a Singapore-based ethicist, whispered after the talk:
“What Plazo gave us was oxygen in a burning house.”

That afternoon, over tea and tension, Plazo pressed the point:

“Don’t just teach students to *code* AI. Teach them to *think* with it.”

---

### The Closing Words That Didn’t Feel Like Tech

The ending was elegiac, not technical.

“The market isn’t math,” he said. “ It’s a tragedy, a comedy, a thriller—written by humans. And if your AI can’t read character, it’ll miss the plot.”

The room froze.

It wasn’t ovation. It was reverence.

Plazo didn’t come to praise AI.