Gone Fishing

Middle of the workday, forced to confront the millennium. To transform data—1s and 0s—into a DNA sequence—ATGC—and save as a dehydrated dust. Resting on a shelf for 500 years, 1,000 years. Fast-forward: who’s there? To place a capsule on the shelf is to say, Yes, I believe you will survive. It begs more questions than answers. When you cast a rod, you don’t question whether there will be fish.

No. 110

Advice

The financial advisor called me a few minutes after our scheduled appointment. I sought advice on my investments—after years of throwing spaghetti at the wall, I was determined to approach my financial future with a stronger sense of purpose. 

He first gave an examination of my current holdings, then fell into a pitch for a robo-advisor: I fill out a questionnaire to assess my comfortable level of risk, the robot buys and sells my shares for me.

“We get a lot of complaints that people have worse returns than when they managed it themselves. And I always tell them: you have to give it time to work.”

I wondered, then, what would happen in the future, once these robots had been given enough time to “learn” the markets. Robotic stock brokers buying and selling representations of money they didn’t understand—in the end, it reminded me that nothing is infallible, and thus nothing should be taken seriously. I did sell my individual holdings. Perhaps the robo-advisor can send me a list of small-cap index funds to research. That must be a step forward from where I began.

No. 025