By Nahyeon Bak and Daisoon Kim
Retail robo-advisors excel at tax-loss harvesting and portfolio discipline, but market-beating returns aren't part of the package
For a monthly fee smaller than a dinner out, an artificial-intelligence tool will analyze your invesment portfolio, optimize your taxes and personalize recommendations to your risk tolerance and retirement timeline - with no hidden commissions and no adviser who forgets about you.
To the 41% of Americans (according to Gallup) who historically have been priced out of quality financial advice, that sounds like a breakthrough.
But before you hand your savings to an algorithm, you should consider what kinds of choices you should trust AI to help you make. Is AI a reliable stock picker? If AI were so good at picking stocks, and able to consistently outperform a basic stock-index fund, would Wall Street sell the service to you and everyone else for $29 to $60 a month? And if an AI had cracked the code to stock picking and was willing to offer it to everyone, could it possibly continue to work?
