Episode 375 · 2026-03-12 · 01:08:52 · Original in Finnish
The founder of Sijoituskerho | Aleksi Kopponen | Negotiator 375
Originally published as “Sijoituskerhon perustaja | Aleksi Kopponen | Neuvottelija 375”
Aleksi Kopponen — founder of the 135,000-member Sijoituskerho investor community and secretary general of the Finnish Ministry of Finance's AI cooperation group — joins Sami Miettinen in March 2026. The episode combines two subjects usually handled apart: how an investor community is built and moderated, and how agent automation changes a public administration of 510,000 person-years across 5,300 organisations. The connecting question is Citrini Research's scenario — if AI expands corporate margins while collapsing wage-based purchasing power, who pays the taxes, and what does an individual investor do about it?
Core theses
- A 135,000-member investor community is a moderation problem before it is an investing one, and the culture is set by what the moderators refuse to allow.
- Public administration automation is bounded by a clock-speed gap between human process and machine execution, not by the technology.
- If AI widens corporate margins while eroding wage income, the tax base moves — which is an investor's problem as much as a state's.
- The guest holds a public-sector role and runs a private community; the episode is candid about speaking in both capacities.
Watch and listen
Key moments
- 00:00 — Aleksi Kopponen, founder of Sijoituskerho
- 00:52 — How the 135,000-member Sijoituskerho community came about
- 03:06 — Sijoituskerho's culture and moderation practices
- 06:18 — The Mandatum block trade through the community's lens
- 09:26 — AI is disrupting exchange dynamics now
- 11:44 — AI in investing as a master's thesis subject
- 15:46 — Citrini Research and the doomer scenario
- 17:44 — Kopponen's role at the Ministry of Finance
- 18:28 — Agent automation at the core of the public sector
- 19:54 — The clock-speed rupture between human and machine
- 21:07 — Sami's and Aleksi's autonomous agents and Second Brain
- 22:16 — Hard analysis to the AI, criticism to the human
- 24:28 — Organisational rationality against the sum for society
- 26:47 — A public sector of 510,000 person-years in transition
- 31:10 — Taxation of labour disappears in the age of AI
- 32:45 — The index fund as Sami's standing recommendation
- 34:08 — ETFs as an instrument for megatrend investing
- 36:10 — Society's inertia slows change but also protects
- 37:00 — Data and an AI-native operating logic win
- 38:51 — MCP and the service bus in public administration
- 51:42 — An overall plan and a ten-million investment programme
- 53:53 — Automating knowledge work as a strategic choice
- 56:08 — Agents booking a boat berth on a citizen's behalf
- 59:07 — Standards, or an operating environment dictated from outside
- 1:01:15 — Top management as the owner, not the IT department
- 1:03:29 — Klarna as a cautionary tale about delegating wrongly
- 1:07:47 — Aleksi and Sami at the Tampere investment fair, 20 May 2026
Summary
Aleksi Kopponen — founder of the 135,000-member Sijoituskerho investor community and secretary general of the Finnish Ministry of Finance’s AI cooperation group — joins Sami Miettinen in March 2026. The episode combines two subjects usually handled apart: how an investor community is built and moderated, and how agent automation changes a public administration of 510,000 person-years across 5,300 organisations. The connecting question is Citrini Research’s scenario — if AI expands corporate margins while collapsing wage-based purchasing power, who pays the taxes, and what does an individual investor do about it?
Two subjects that turn out to be one
The community half is about moderation rather than stock picking: what a 135,000-member forum allows and refuses decides its culture, and the Mandatum block trade is used as the worked example of how such a group reads an event in real time.
The public sector half is about scale — 510,000 person-years across 5,300 organisations — and about a constraint that is not technological. Kopponen’s phrase for it is a rupture in clock speed: the machine executes at one rate and the surrounding process at another, and the gap, not the model, is what sets the pace of change.
The connecting question
Citrini Research’s scenario ties the halves together. If AI widens corporate margins while wage income erodes, the tax base shifts away from labour — which is simultaneously a problem for the state that employs the guest and for the investor community he founded. The episode does not resolve it, and says so.
Watch
The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Sijoituskerhon perustaja | Aleksi Kopponen | Neuvottelija 375. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.
In depth
The Neuvottelija AI editions carry a long-form write-up of this episode: English · suomeksi.
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Guests: Aleksi Kopponen