From robo-advisor to AI advisor?

If your robot wants access to your wallet, be careful. It could be planning its financial independence. Today's question is: Would you trust an AI tool more than a financial advisor? When professional quant traders began using AI tools last year, there was an outcry from the Chinese public: they were “viewed as ‘bloodsuckers’ by retail investors,” reports Reuters, “and blamed by regulators for contributing to market unfairness and volatility.” But now Chinese retail traders are embracing DeepSeek themselves. “The rapid adoption of DeepSeek in China's retail-dominated stock market is also prompting changes at brokerages and wealth managers, while creating new risks for investors in a market dominated and driven by small-time traders' cash flow. ‘The future is the digital age, and AI will be vital,’ Hong Yangjun told a packed room of individual investors learning to trade with AI on a weekend in February. Just as future warfare will be fought with drones and robots, the stock market will be a battleground between computers, the lecturers told the class in an office in downtown Shanghai. ‘In the future, Chinese investors will completely change the way they make investment decisions and place orders,’ said Zhou Lefeng, president of Xiangcai Securities. ‘Previously, clients would ask wealth managers for investment advice. Now they ask DeepSeek.’ Larry Cao, principal analyst at FinAI Research, said DeepSeek is popular because it's cost-efficient, has strong reasoning ability, and unlike ChatGPT, is readily available, and is promoted by the Chinese government. Nevertheless, he is surprised at the level of faith investors put in the model, cautioning that AI has limits. ‘People trust AI models more than they trust financial advisers, which is probably misplaced trust at least at this stage,’ Cao said.”