While few would deny that companies everywhere are struggling, an analysis detailed in Bloomberg indicates that the ones that have done the best are those that rely on people the least. The analysis, conducted by brokerage firm StoneX Group Inc., divided the S&P 500 into deciles based on a measure called "market value of intangible assets per employee," or the price of a firm's intellectual property and brand recognition compared with the number of employees. Using this method, the analysis found that companies with a small number of workers relative to company value have seen an 18 percent return this year, despite the pandemic's economic chaos; in contrast, those with the more labor-intensive businesses saw a 19 percent loss.

For instance, the least labor-intensive firm in the S&P 500, MarketAxcess Holdings, is an automated bond trading company that employs 530 people and has seen a 29 percent rise in share price. Conversely, Diamondback Energy, a petroleum company, has seen its share price tumble by 59 percent. This indicates, according to Bloomberg, that there is a bear market in people, suggesting that employees have become more of a liability overall, at least partially due to the fact that humans can get sick while machines generally cannot.

Bloomberg said this shift has been hastened rather than created by the pandemic, as the slow displacement of human labor had been the trend for some number of years before. This has been the case even in the financial sector. High-frequency trading, for example, now makes up 75 percent of all market volume, according to Fortune. An article in Law360 said that 70 percent of all futures trading is done electronically as well. A 2015  joint report by the New York Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said that, on a normal day, 50 percent of "total trading in both the cash and futures markets" in U.S. treasuries is done by firms that engage almost exclusively in high-frequency trading.