Robots are taking over your portfolio

The online services, now considered mainstream, will pick stocks for you at the push of a button

Cars driving themselves. Robots vacuuming your floors. What’s next? Robots managing your money — and it’s already happening.

The investing world was disrupted big-time in 2015 with the age of roboadvisers — online services that will pick stocks for you based on your personal financial goals and taste for risk. Just push a button and you have a brokerage account filled with a sound portfolio of stocks.

Roboadvisers have been tried before, but this year Charles Schwab made it mainstream. It’s now as socially acceptable to use a computer to build your portfolio as it is to get a ride or even a date. Schwab customers have $4.1 billion invested with the brokerage firm’s Intelligent Portfolios offering, as of the end of Septem- ber, and it just opened the service early this year. Rival Betterment, which offers a competing service, now has $3.2 billion in assets under management, up 191% from the start of the year.

Roboadvisers aren’t just for Millennials starting out. Schwab’s average roboadviser client age is 44, and 75% of Betterment’s customers are older than 32. Roboadviser customers have $85,000 portfolios with Schwab and $25,000 with Betterment, on average. And investors’ eagerness to hand over investment management to an algorithm means many more major banks and brokerages will offer roboadvisers in 2016, Naureen Hassan at Schwab says. “The technology is becoming mainstream,” she says.

The robots aren’t done, Betterment CEO Jon Stein says. Expect more advice to be added to roboadvisory firms, he says, such as retirement planning: “The 401(k) is the last bastion yet to be brought to the modern age.”