Finance
Can Humans Understand How Robots Invest?
A new ETF buys stocks picked by artificial intelligence. That requires a leap of faith.
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For a guy who built a robot he hopes will banish human emotion from the investing process, Chida Khatua spends a lot of time trying to figure out how it thinks.
Khatua is chief executive officer of EquBot, a San Francisco company that’s built an artificial intelligence system for investing. In October, a day before the launch of an exchange-traded fund that uses EquBot recommendations, his team was going over stocks the computer wanted to buy. One name popped out: Brookdale Senior Living Inc., which operates retirement communities and nursing homes. This was back when wildfires were burning parts of California, where some of Brookdale’s facilities sit.