MarketWatch 50 is the most influential people in 2022
This is a year in financial markets that will be remembered. Stocks had their worst start to a year since the Great Depression and quickly entered a bear market. The price of cryptocurrencies plunged by more than 60%. The Federal Reserve delivered the biggest interest-rate hike in decades. Oil prices went past $100 a barrel, and yields on government bonds went up. MarketWatch wants to know who are the people who are influencing markets the most in this monumental year? Our newsroom is trying to figure out this out, and we are turning to our readers for help. This fall we plan to publish a list of the 50 most influential people in markets, the MarketWatch 50.
We want to know what they think. We want to know what they think. Who are the traders, investors, policy makers, government officials, CEOs, and influencers who are the most influential players in the world in 2022? We want to come up with a list that is as broad and diverse as the market itself. The MarketWatch 50 will consist of people whose actions, work and opinions have a significant impact on markets. These people are the ones who are responsible for the price of securities, commodities or currencies, influence the behavior and strategies of market participants and play a role in how markets are structured, regulated and function.
Some of the bigger names in markets this year are obvious. In the year 2022, Elon Musk launched a $44 billion deal for Twitter TWTR, kept working in his special way to transform the automobile industry and spacecraft at SpaceX, and continued to back a coin started as a joke in Dogecoin DOGEUSD. Jerome Powell has led the Federal Reserve in a year, when he pivoted from pumping liquidity into the market to enacting a huge interest-rate hike within a span of weeks.
Market influencers are less obvious. They don't necessarily need to head large institutions. How do I know Keith Gill? The day trader helped launch the meme-stock craze with Reddit posts detailing his GameStop positions, leading to an epic short squeeze that hit large hedge funds. In 2021, Gill would have been an excellent MarketWatch 50 candidate, but this year he has been silent, and doesn't seem to have had any impact at all, and the meme frenzy has faded. Are there other people who influence market behavior in 2022 through social-media posts?
Here is how this will work. The newsroom of MarketWatch will collect and review the nominations. Our editorial team will read each submission and we will circulate the strong and interesting candidates among our staff for consideration. There is room in the nomination form to tell us why a candidate is having an outsized influence on markets this year.
MarketWatch reporters will be scour their beats, talk to their sources and work to follow up on promising submissions. A list-selection committee consisting MarketWatch's group editors and the editor in chief will decide the final list.
We are giving you the summer to think about this.