I come from a background in urban planning. I spent years studying how cities form, why they grow where they grow, why wealth accumulates in some places and not others. The answer, almost always, comes down to flows.
Not rivers. Not roads. Flows of capital, trade, and information that concentrate in specific places over long periods of time and eventually crystallize into what we call a financial center. London didn't become London because of its weather. New York didn't become New York because of its geography alone. These cities are, in a very literal sense, the physical sediment of centuries of transactions. Once I understood that, I started to understand something else. And that is what this piece is about.
The industrial revolution didn't give people machines. It gave them options.
The steam engine is remembered for what it produced. But its deeper effect was what it dissolved. Before industrialization, your economic fate was largely determined by where you were born and what your father did. The land, the guild, the village: these were the boundaries of possibility. The factory was brutal. The hours were long, the conditions often inhumane. But for millions of people it represented something structurally new, a way out. For the first time, labor had a market that extended beyond local circumstance. You could produce something and someone somewhere else would pay for it.
That is what I mean when I say the industrial revolution gave people freedom. Not comfort. Not equality. Just the first serious break between birth circumstances and economic outcome.
Trading, I believe, is doing something structurally similar. To understand why, you need to understand what cities actually are.
Cities are where the flows stopped
For centuries, capital, goods, and information moved across the world through networks of trade routes, shipping lanes, and legal circuits. These flows weren't random. They concentrated at certain nodes: ports, junctions, financial hubs. Over time those nodes became self-reinforcing. Where capital flows, institutions follow. Where institutions consolidate, more capital flows. The loop tightens.
London became the world's financial center not by accident but by accumulation. It sat at the intersection of global trade routes, built the legal and banking infrastructure to manage that trade, and attracted the talent to operate the infrastructure. By the nineteenth century, the invisible web of transactions running through the City of London was so dense and so established that it had become a kind of gravitational field. The physical city, the buildings, the law firms, the trading floors, the accounting houses, was the material expression of that gravity.
New York followed the same logic, a century later, organized around different trade flows but identical in structure. Tokyo too. These are not just wealthy cities. They are what centuries of concentrated capital flows look like when you build something on top of them.
This is what urban planners study. The city is downstream from the flow, not the other way around.
The problem with gravity is that it excludes
For most of history, participating meaningfully in global capital markets required physical proximity to these nodes. A merchant in Warsaw, Lagos, or Buenos Aires was not structurally excluded because he lacked talent or ambition. He was excluded because the instruments, the counterparties, the information, and the execution infrastructure all existed in London or New York. Proximity was the entry ticket.
This wasn't just inconvenient. It was a form of economic geography that mapped directly onto global inequality. Financial participation correlated almost perfectly with physical location, not because of anything inherent to those places, but because the flows had crystallized there and the crystallization had been accumulating for centuries. The physical blueprint of global finance was the map. If you weren't on the map, you were largely outside the system.
The internet didn't just change communication. It decoupled participation from location.
What happened next is something I think we still underestimate.
The internet didn't just make it easier to send messages. It collapsed information latency across the entire financial system. The gap between what a trader in London knew and what a trader in Bucharest knew, measured in days or weeks for most of history, became milliseconds. Then it effectively disappeared.
This mattered enormously, because information asymmetry was one of the key structural advantages that proximity to financial centers provided. Being in the room wasn't just convenient. It meant you knew things first. Distance wasn't just inconvenient; it was a systematic disadvantage built into the architecture of how markets worked.
Broad internet access changed that architecture. Real-time price data, research, execution platforms, analytical tools: things that required institutional infrastructure and a physical address in a financial center a generation ago became accessible to anyone with a broadband connection. The terminal that cost tens of thousands of dollars a year to sit on a trading desk is now approximated by tools available from a laptop anywhere in the world.
The flows are still running. London, New York, and Tokyo remain gravitational centers. But for the first time in the history of capital markets, you do not need to be physically present in a node to participate in the flow running through it.
What freedom actually means
I want to be careful here, because "freedom" is a word that gets used to sell things. It appears in brokerage advertisements and it usually refers to something much smaller than freedom.
What I mean is structural.
The industrial revolution's deepest promise, the one that took generations to partially deliver, was that where you were born should not determine the ceiling of your economic participation. The factory floor didn't achieve this cleanly or fairly. But it introduced the mechanism: a market for labor that extended beyond the village, the guild, the inherited position.
Access to trading extends this logic further than any previous mechanism has. Your physical location no longer determines your access to global capital flows. The flows themselves, which built London, which built New York, which mapped the geography of global wealth for five centuries, are now accessible from anywhere with a reliable internet connection. The physical blueprint of those flows is, for your purposes as a participant, increasingly beside the point.
That is a radical change. It has happened quickly. And most people have not yet appreciated what it means.
I came to trading from planning, from years of studying how geography shapes economic fate. What I have come to believe is that we are living through the first moment in modern history when that geographic determination is being seriously disrupted. Not eliminated. Not made fair overnight. But disrupted in a structural way that matters.
The market doesn't care where you're from. It never did. But for most of history, getting to the market required being in the right place. That requirement is dissolving. And that, I think, is what freedom looks like when it shows up in the real world: not as an abstraction, but as a structural shift in who gets to participate in the flows that matter.