The subject of today's presentation was "Robo Investing" which refers to a new type of online software which can manage an investment portfolio with minimal to no human involvement. Our speakers, Trisha Qualy and Tom Rippberger from Advisor Net Financial, provide consulting services to investment advisory firms and have studied this new approach in order to help their client firms decide if it something they want to offer their customers. The optimal candidate for robo investing is someone who does not want to hire a financial advisor, doesn’t have enough assets to hire a financial advisor yet, or someone who has been a do-it-yourself investor, but no longer wants to select investments, rebalance and place trades on their accounts.Robo advisors automatically select investments and build an individuaized portfolio that will track toward an individual's investment goals. Performance will typically be at or perhaps slightly below the performance of an average portfolio maintained in the "normal" way. The big advantage is the significantly lower cost of this approach. One limitation is that this new tool has only come into existance in 2009, therefore it has not been tested in a bear market. It can also be over-ridden, allowing human decision making to enter in. Our speakers closed by concluding that this is here to stay and will likely grow as an approach. They presented information predicting which jobs are likely to be done in the future by machines vs. humans. Investment Advising fell somewhere in the middle. At the top of the list was "loan officer" which shows a 98% probability of becoming an automated vs. human process. Thinking about a new career? According to the info presented, you'd be best served by going to medical or law school as these jobs show less than a 1% change of becoming mechanized in the future!