Are robots coming to take investor jobs on Wall Street?

[Jimbo101]

NY Post

The robots are rolling forward with a full-frontal assault to capture Wall Street’s vast investment fees and commissions.

More investors are warming to the cold, steely embrace of the increasingly sophisticated, low-cost automated robo-advisers. The primary reason is to save money on those fees and charges.

Bots are squeezing their flesh-and-blood competition and threatening the jobs of thousands of human brokers in the $20 trillion US wealth management business.

Nearly one in three investors says these machines are superior at picking stocks and lessen their risk, and almost as many say the machines are better at selecting investments for retirement than human brokers, according to a new study of US investors by market research and consulting firm Spectrem Group.

Respondents had a minimum net worth of $100,000. An earlier study by Spectrem in 2015 was not as bullish, with 6 percent of affluent investors saying they’d used a pure technology-based platform to enter information for a robo-recommended portfolio.

Today, more US investors are pulling assets from human wealth managers and putting the money quietly to work with the expanding army of robo-advisers

[nycbos]

1. Probably there taking over everywhere else.

[raccoon]

2. I wish they would. I'd love to see some of those who seem to feel they are entitled

to a cushy lifestyle, even if they run the US economy into the ground, get their comeuppance.

[ymetca]

3. And when they are done there

they can replace Congress, and precisely, in real-time, tabulate how every single constituent wants them to vote.

OMG! Mob rule by proxy!

[DetlefK]

5. You should read the "Culture"-novels by Iain Banks. Or the "Polity"-novels by Neal Asher.

In the "Culture"-novels, mankind is part of an anarchic quasi-socialist interstellar federation ruled by powerful AIs. The AIs do all the governing and are smart and only want the best for the humans... Because no human is capable of handling all the administrative and political tasks of ruling such big societies.
To the AIs of the Culture, humans are basically pets. They love us, they want to see us happy, they love to watch us living our lives, they support our wishes as long as its reasonable and feasible ... But they would never entrust a human with actual political power.

Similarly in the "Polity"-novels. Humans are the vast majority of society, but the actual governing and administration is done by AIs. Here, humans do have some political power, but only on a local level. On an interstellar level, political decisions are made by the AIs.

[ymetca]

6. "All watched over by machines of loving grace" - Richard Brautigan

Perhaps it is already true. See Philip K. Dick's VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System).

Or Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the Noosphere.

Perhaps individual humans are merely part of some larger planetary intelligence. Each of us some sort of probing/sensory organ.

My wife insists, however, that our pets domesticated us, and not the other way around!

[DetlefK]

4. Short answer? Yes.

Neural Networks are incredibly powerful. You can feed them with a shit-ton of data and they can make bafflingly accurate predictions. They can beat humans at chess, checkers, go, poker... If they have all the data, their decisions are better than decisions made by humans.

One such developer is the company NeuroBayes. Their software can predict how much of which product your company will sell in a given season.
The developers once had the software take part in an office-pool of a fantasy-sports-league: The software came in second.
On their homepage they have a browser-game: The software predicts whether your next click will be a left-click or a right-click.
http://www.phi-t.de/mousegame/index_eng.html
(needs Java plug-in)

In another example, a software based on a Neural Network did a speed-run on the first level of the videogame Super Mario Brothers, pulling of incredible close-call jumps.
How did the software do this? It ran 30,000 trial&error simulations until it had found one that works.

And for investments, a Neural Network can do the same. Their predictive powers are most impressive. The only thing where they fail is chaotic, random systems, like the stock-market, but if there's a system to beating the stock-market then you can bet your ass that a Neural Network will find it.