Weekend reading: Buckle up for self-driving portfolios

The first Weekend Reading every month can be read by anyone on the Monevator website. Subscribe for free to our email newsletter or become a member to ensure you see the rest. What caught my eye this week. Would you be happy handing over the reigns of your portfolio to a robot? Given most of you will be regular Monevator readers and email subscribers, I can guess the answer – if not the specific gentle expletive added for colour… Of course, the typical Monevator reader (rightly) invests passively in index tracker funds. And those funds are managed by software – albeit usually with some kind of human oversight to determine which companies go in and come out of a given index, as we saw with the recent controversy over SpaceX. However it’s one thing to use software to follow a well-established and diversified benchmark via what’s now very mainstream index fund investing. It’s another to toss the keys to a novel AI agent with a cheery, “have it it, call me if you blow the kids’…