Robots Are Replacing Humans at All These Wall Street Firms

The world's biggest money manager on Tuesday announced that it would cut more than 40 jobs, replacing some of its human portfolio managers with artificially intelligent, computerized stock-trading algorithms. Research, after all, has shown that active stock pickers generally underperform the wider stock market, leading customers to balk at the high fees those managers charge. Investors are increasingly seeking cheaper options such as exchange-traded funds, some of which are managed by computers--a trend that helped push BlackRock's assets under management above $5 trillion for the first time recently. The layoffs due to automation are an industry-wide shift. By 2025, financial institutions will reduce their human workforce by 10%--resulting in roughly 230,000 fewer heads--as computers take their place, the financial services consultancy Opimas estimates in a recent report.