New ETF has robots pick investments

The explosion of data from the internet and elsewhere needs to be processed objectively

A new fund will let robots pick stocks. The AI Powered Equity Exchange-Traded Fund, which launched in the US on Wednesday, will use IBM Corp’s Watson artificial intelligence technology to pick several dozen stocks with potential to beat the market, the fund’s backers say.

The actively managed fund chooses stocks based on a set of rules created by EquBot LLC that uses artificial intelligence to analyse up to 10 years of data on thousands of stocks, including market sentiment, regulatory filings, news articles and social media posts.

It ranks each company based on the forecasted probability that each will profit from current