If you’re a fan of the brilliant, page-turner author Robert Harris, you may have read ‘The Fear Index’, his surely-sci-fi 2011 novel about a hedge fund managed by Artificial Intelligence. Well, guess what, such a thing has come to pass, at the behest of Standard Life, no less. In the novel the AI could also control the markets. I’d give it less than another seven years, wouldn’t you? Clever these Chinese, as my grandad might have said.
“Record year for annuity sales driven by advisers”
I was asked this week whether annuities are now ‘a good investment’. They’ve been recommended very rarely in recent years, since ‘pension freedoms’ allowed pretty much unlimited drawdown on pension funds and anything left to be passed on to beneficiaries free of Inheritance Tax.