World's first AI-run global exchange-traded fund debuts

Steve Hawkins said AI will prove itself to be smarter than your average portfolio manager

The first global equity exchange-traded fund (ETF) run by robots made its trading debut even as its managers expressed anxiety about investing in an ETF lacking the human touch.

“I’m going to be buying some but I’m buying it as a nervous investor myself,” Steve Hawkins, co-chief executive officer of Horizons ETFs Management Canada, said before the Horizons Active AI Global Equity ETF began trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange Wednesday. “We don’t know what the computer will do.”

Hawkins stressed that the artificial intelligence behind the ETF, developed by Korea-based Qraft Technologies, was rigorously back-tested over 10 years of market moves