I, Robot

There is nothing like investing when it comes to exposing yourself as a weak-minded gimboid.

I know all about buying stocks low and selling high. I understand the rationale behind Warren Buffett’s aphorism, “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”

Yet when my portfolio hits red, I fret. And when my return numbers glow green, I feel the pleasure centres in my brain light up like Vegas.

The uptick in fortune means it will cost me more every time I buy additional equities, of course. But hang the expense, I want to be a part of this now! The party’s on and I need to get my snout in the trough, quick.

I know this because despite being a good passive investor who pound-cost averages and rebalances annually, I am not an entirely mechanical man.

And oh, the flesh is weak.

Only flesh and blood

You see I long allowed myself a measure of freedom when investing – a certain amount of money to put into the market every year that wasn’t dictated by the calendar.

Don’t get me wrong. This was never a gambler’s float, used to punt on some company that’s rumoured to be on the verge of discovering cancer-curing jam.

I invested my discretionary dollop in index trackers. However I was free to do so whenever I wished.

Sounds good? The snag is that in reality I struggled to take the plunge when the market did. I wasn’t always been brave enough to blow my ammo when equities were relatively cheap. I held on and on until the upswings, and then I got less for my money.

Oh I had my excuses. Especially when I hadn’t yet escaped the rat race, and so was still subject to the whims of The Man as well as Mr Market.

Impure instinct

Especially before full-strength financial independence had my back, my brain was always on hand with self-justifications to reassure me that reason was actually in control, not instinct:

• I was worried about my job.

• My company was restructuring.

• My monthly drip-feed was already casting cash into the cavernous cake hole of the capital markets.

• “I better not throw in any more in case I’m axed! I’ll need every penny.”

The reality was that the overweening fear of loss was in charge.

What these optional investing side quests actually taught me was I am just one of the herd. A member of the cattle class.

I’m not special. I react and feel like everyone else who makes up the statistics that show this sort of irrational behaviour can cost investors dear.

Gorilla warfare

The truth is it takes willpower to overcome the apeman within, and there’s some evidence that willpower is in limited supply for all of us. We can’t bank on having enough in reserve when we need it.

This in turn means the fewer decisions that are left up to my meat-bag of a brain, the better.

Passive investing would be much easier if we could program a robot to handle it all for us and to physically prevent our continued interference, like some benevolent Dalek with a taser.

Perhaps the AI revolution will give us all the cold-blooded reptilian investing agent of our dreams?

Once it’s emerged from the primordial slop, I mean.

Well, perhaps. But until we can trust an agent to run our portfolio without it going rogue and selling the house to bet everything on pork futures, it’s up to us to manage our all-too-fallible frontal lobes.

Don’t just do something

Back when I still stacking my escape-stash, automatic investing droids were nowhere to be seen. So instead I automated as much of the investing process as possible.

You see, the one human behaviour that always worked for me is inertia.

• I never messed with the direct debit that funnelled money out of my bank account and into my broker’s.

• I kept hands-off the regular investment scheme that piped cash straight to my chosen funds.

• I dared not touch lock-in wrappers like ISAs, pensions, and fixed-term bank accounts, where a cost is imposed for premature evacuation.

Inertia is the great human pacifier. It’s a force that’s more powerful than fear in my world – especially if the fear is something intangible, like an investing loss.

Eliminate all carbon units

There are other weak points where human intervention can easily scupper the best plans.

For instance, you might fiddle with asset allocation every time you choose the next fund to buy. And, boy, what mischief you can get up to when it’s time to rebalance…

“Sell those lovely equities to buy more bloody bonds. In this market?!”

Putting my investing on rails did help me to resist the urge to keep thrashing my winners.

But it sometimes also took a stiffening of resolve, and a quick prayer of deliverance to the passive investing gods.

Older and colder

Since I declared myself FIRE – and declared to my bosses where they could shove The Accumulator’s Personal Growth and Development Plan V4.6 – I’ve found it easier to leave my portfolio to do its thing.

I suppose the same fully-funded sangfroid that enables me to do some work on the side without getting sucked back into the office is also helping me to ignore the market noise.

Have I then reached some state of investing transcendence?

Doubtful. So far so good, but I’m regularly tested and I’m still only a passive investor.

I stayed the course during the Covid crash, true, and I learned more than I lamented during the recent bond-a-geddon.

But who knows how a real humdinger of a bear market would hit me?

Better to stay humble and self-aware.

Automatic for the people

If you recognise these frailties in yourself, then there are various tools you could explore to take the human edge off – from automatic investment plans at online brokers, to all-in-one personal finance apps that limit your investing choices but also your horizons.

They can still be enablers when it comes to self-destructive fiddling, though. And they can be relatively expensive.

These days there’s a lot of talk that AI agents will soon do everything for us. In theory it sounds like automatic investing nirvana. But when you think about how obsequious the typical chatbot is, would you really trust one not to egg on your worst impulses?

Besides, from what I can see AI is so far mostly being deployed to tempt investors off the rational path.

All-in-one not one-for-all

Perhaps the closest proxy for a truly hands-off investing robot is a good multi-asset fund.

Made popular in the UK by Vanguard’s LifeStrategy products, a multi-asset fund is an index-tracking, fund-of-funds with built-in rebalancing features – truly automatic investing.

All you need do is pick the asset allocation of your choice, set-up a direct debit to keep it oiled, and then let the program run.

With this sort of investing the human being is taken off the table – which is the point of the exercise after all – and everything is left to the robot. No more pesky emotions.

Of course, you might eventually start to worry that your multi-asset fund hasn’t got all the assets you want. Not in the right doses, anyway.

Perhaps you’re being greedy or fearful, or perhaps you’ve become better informed. Humans are not incapable of judgement, after all. It’s the rash decisions we want to tamp down, not the strategic thinking.

At least with your investing machine whirring away in the background, you can take time to explore your options with the serenity of a wannabe Cyborg Buffett.

Batteries not included.

Take it steady,

The Accumulator