Howdy @willmatt72
This is just my opinion here, of course. As MJG has stated many times over the years, don't take investment suggestions from internet strangers.
My observations of the A.I. area, from a tech. background. As noted by others, one doesn't need a tech. background to observe what is taking place all of the time in the world of technology. I suspect the majority of the public, let alone many investors; don't really pay attention to what is taking place. No second thoughts about Alexa and related, nor to the fact of face or thumb print recognition for personal devices they use everyday or their Robo floor sweeper, eh?
Many here have A.I., machine learning and robotic manufacturing investments and chip companies through some broad-based equity holdings and/or technology fund holdings; which includes medical/biotech.
The big names one recognizes; Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Google, IBM, and list goes on...are obviously involved in A.I. type functions. Amazon may seem an " e-commerce" only company to most.....but, not, yes?
Amazon and other established companies continue and IMHO will continue (if it fits their business model) to acquire publicly traded companies and start ups one has never heard the name of, involved with all things tech.
Thoughts about some of this.
1. From the vast personal wealth that exists from previous involvement in technology, many of the small A.I. related companies will not become public, as they are able to be fully funded by private monies,but may be purchased by established companies, as in companies with BOTZ and related etf's.
2. Two quick examples. Want to be a para-legal? Not so sure this is a good choice today. A company is working on case procedures, background work for a form of legal proceeding, legal contracts. The human search to discover needed documents required 51-156 minutes (best and worst human discovery times), while an A.I. powered server loaded with proper data required 26 seconds. NOTE: I'm writing this example with the belief the information is correct, reference, LAWGEEX.
2a. Benevolent. A private British company. Removed my write and placed this short video link next:
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/04/19/investors-beginning-to-see-how-important-ai-can-be-for-the-uk-economy-pro.html
This easy view link below of holdings (only the top 10 of 29, unless you have a Fidelity account) for the top 10, which is 70% of this etf, BOTZ . At least for this etf, one is not investing in a bunch of start up companies. These are established companies to a global aspect, many of which, the individual investor does not have ready access to invest easily.
https://screener.fidelity.com/ftgw/etf/goto/snapshot/portfolioComposition.jhtml?symbols=BOTZ
Another A.I. example:
https://sciencetrends.com/just-4-hours-googles-ai-mastered-chess-knowledge-history/
@willmatt72 I started this write a few days ago, but schedules got in the way of posting.
I have read your recent follow-up and obviously you continue to search for validation of investment potential in this more narrow tech. sector. I personally find this area valid for investment. Yes, there will be burps here and there; not unlike broad equity and equity sector investing. Whether narrow sector investing is suitable for all portfolios obviously depends upon the individual, their overall portfolio, their temperament and study of a given area.
Our house tends more towards chunk investing versus dollar cost averaging; but this sector is valid (IMHO) to whatever method is available or of a comfort level for an individual. Heck, lots of folks here do sector investing.....Europe, Asia, growth, value, healthcare, tech., EM bonds, IG bonds, etc. Generally speaking, we're all sector investors attempting to establish a "balance".
Our other tech.: FTEC
https://screener.fidelity.com/ftgw/etf/goto/snapshot/portfolioComposition.jhtml?symbols=FTEC
Additional: ROBO composition
https://screener.fidelity.com/ftgw/etf/goto/snapshot/portfolioComposition.jhtml?symbols=ROBO
Chart overview, 1 year, selected tech.
http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?BOTZ,ROBO,XLK,IXN,JAGTX,FSPTX&p=5&O=011000
Disclosure: 6% of our equity exposure is BOTZ.
I'm going to dig through a few saved videos and post to your thread later. Current Westworld is good example. :) I recall watching the original movie with Yul Brenner.
Didn't proof read this......hopefully, not too messy.
Regards,
Catch

FYI: The same mind-set and habits that work so well when people are building their nest egg can damage their quality of life—and their investments—in retirement.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.cetusnews.com/news/The-Mental-Mistakes-We-Make-With-Retirement-Spending.S1nOzov2f.html

@VintgeFreak I am saying look at page 24 and understand that this is the same kind of subprime mortgage debt that caused the crash and Region Morgan's meltdown:
alphacentricfunds.com/funds/IncomeOpp/presentation.pdf
However, much has changed in the subprime market since 2008 and funds like this one, Semper and the Pimco closed-end fund have basically made a fortune off picking through the rubble, profiting off the immense suffering subprime lending caused to the body politic. Capitalism at its best. What has happened are two things--subprime loans are gradually disappearing as what remaining debt issued pre-crisis matures and new issues don't take its place and a lot of the worst mortgage borrowers have already defaulted in many managers who invest in this stuff's view. So they say its safer than it was in 2007. But much of the juice in the sector has already been wrung out of it. The time to buy was in 2009 and 2010. Now there is still illiquidity in the sector, significant credit risk and modest yields for that risk. But people are willing to take that risk because they're desperate for yield. Valuation and pricing are still far from perfect because of liquidity issues. Most of these securities are rated "level 2" during good times like now and some even "level 3." Google the meaning of "level 2 securities," but basically while there is a market for these securities it is nowhere as near as robust as Treasuries or investment grade corporate debt. And in a severe selloff--and in particular a credit driven selloff--pricing again will likely become an issue again.

okay... are we saying IOFIX is investing in such "1-share stocks"?

I'm 39% bonds. Pretty stinky. Globally, my stuff smells bad tonight. Winners, ytd: PRWCX, PRIDX, PRDSX, VSCIX. .... Worst, ytd: SFGIX, PREMX, MAPOX. Nothing drastically falling apart. I'd just rather see black than red.

SGGIX -2.06% YD ..... PREMX -1.29% YD ..... MAPOX -2.87% YD
That’s your worst? Pretty trifling so far. You’re playing in the big leagues. - @Crash :)
I dunno about bonds. But if you thought bonds were a good investment a year ago, they’re an even better one now that they’re earning a higher rate of return.

@Flack, a few good reads on "How to Manage Sequence Risk":
4-approaches-managing-sequence-returns-risk-retirement/
And,
Part 1:
theretirementcafe.com/2013/09/clarifying-sequence-of-returns-risk.html
Part 2:
theretirementcafe.com/2013/09/clarifying-sequence-of-returns-risk_20.html

@hank Thanks for the digging. If Amazon has over a half million employees (Ritholtz cited CNN here), and only 4% (20,000) of them are in the warehouses, what are the other 96% doing? How many are at Whole Foods or running Amazon's servers, or ...?
Hard to make all the numbers fit together. In any case, it looks like Amazon's pay scale is not out of whack. One would have to look at things like geographic distribution to go beyond sweeping generalizations. I don't think either of us is going to do that.

“The average U.S. warehouse worker, at Amazon or anywhere else, earns a third more than a retail worker. The median hourly wage of a warehouse worker is $13.50, or about 30% more than the average U.S. retail worker's pay of $10.09, according to the Department of Labor ... Amazon wouldn't say how much it pays its workers. But according to data gathered by career website Glassdoor.com, Amazon pays its 20,000 warehouse workers an average hourly wage of about $12, which is below the national average.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/30/news/companies/amazon-warehouse-workers/index.html
My humble math skills: Multiply $12 X 40 (hours a week) X 50 (weeks per year worked) =
$24,000 per year earned. Ouch - That’s a trashy amount to live on. Some mitigating factors might be if they receive health insurance, stock in the company, performance incentives or any type of 401K match. Any one of those would result in a higher real salary.
One thing to remember is that Amazon is still a relatively young rapidly expanding company. As such it would be expected to have a younger less experienced workforce which might translate into a lower medium salary. Another issue is education. Low skill jobs don’t pay well. Globalization? I think so. But also speaks to the importance of families promoting their kids’ learning, supporting schools and stressing the importance of post-secondary education, whether college, trade school or other.
PS - My first post-college job paid $5,200 per year. No insurance. The second year I landed a “high paying” position paying a bit over $7,000 yearly and having health insurance. (And that’s right when Nixon imposed the wage/price freeze). :)

A cautionary tale: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/business/30loan.html

"The median salary ... is $28,446, excluding [one person]."
Gosh, do you think that including one more figure would alter the median salary?
He goes on to compare Amazon's median salary with Apple's average salary. The Apple figure he's citing really is its median pay, but you wouldn't know that from his text.
He acknowledge that Apple includes a lot of retail workers, but in a way that suggests this is little different from selling pots and pans at Wallmart. In fact, paysa.com (his source) classifies Apple Associate Sales Specialists as selling electronics, not the largely generic type of stuff at Amazon. Even in the electronics arena Apple is atypical, coming in at second highest pay for associate sales specialist. (The highest paying is Covidien, now part of Medtronics, selling highly specialized medical equipment.)
He thinks that comparing a CEO's net worth to that of the average employee is more informative than comparing the CEO's compensation package to that of the median employee. Somehow he comes up with a ration of 100B:1.
He writes: "Here's how I came up with that ratio", then goes on to say that the median net worth of the workers is somewhere between negative and slightly positive. So already you know that whatever figure he comes up with is highly unstable. (Change the workers' net worth from $1 to $10 and you change the ratio by an order of magnitude.) But he never tells you how he picked some number between "negative and slightly more than zero."
Really! There may be some message, but with all the junk numbers, it's hard to discern what it is.

I’ve looked at annuities in the past and the pay-out looked so bleak compared to what one can reasonably expect to make in the markets than I ran away. That was at substantially lower Fed/10-year rates than today. Does anyone know if annuities now offer better payouts than a couple years ago or - better yet - whether their attractiveness will continue to improve now that interest rates are finally rising?

The thrill of gathering assets at hedge fund expense ratios. Gotham averages 2.5% er. Half charge more than 3%. But Gotham's been winning since launch. 20 of 21 funds have handsomely beaten their peers. This year, however, they have generally followed the market down, drawdowns at end of March from -3 to -8%, averaging -5%. c

Here's a review by someone who got a response to some of his questions from Beam, though they were mostly "nonanswers". He also got a live account and describes how it works. To quote from his page: "Spoiler alert: it’s not good."
https://www.getrichquickish.net/2017/07/beam-high-interest-rate-bank-account.html
I've been around Silicon Valley and startups enough to recognize some patterns. Not awful, just stuff you get used to.
The idea that we can do better than anyone else because ... well, just because. Think of all the silly companies built during the dot com boom.
It will be better because we'll apply TECHNOLOGY. Look at Oscar Insurance - a startup Obamacare company, a darling of VCs (unlike most startups). This excerpt about it from Politico could easily apply to Beam:

Health insurance is a relatively staid business. ... Oscar wasn’t revolutionizing the model and the cliche about the “Uber of health care” ignored the fact that health insurance is one of the most- regulated markets in the country while Uber capitalized on regulatory loopholes.
Oscar’s bet, indeed its raison d'etre, is that its superior technology will keep its patients healthier or provide them with less expensive medical interventions when they do become ill.

It's very common not to say much about business models, especially when there aren't high barriers to entry. From a customer perspective it doesn't matter much unless it's illegal, or you would be hurt if the company went out of business. It's different for investors, and startups do share their business plans under NDAs to potential investors.
Here's all I can find on their backing and staff:
https://angel.co/meetbeam
Statups try to generate buzz. They'll puff up whatever connections they have. So on the home page you see "TRUSTED BY OUR ADVOCATES". Not advocates so much as just publications where their launch was reported (like the Forbes article).
What you don't see here is a list of partners or investors. (Even those can be greatly exaggerated, where partnership could mean just a normal transactional relationship.)
A hype campaign, an effort to build a customer base quickly. Pushing customers to network with their friends. Attracting people by making it seem exclusive. Even Google did that with gmail:

The aura of exclusivity and experimentation stuck to mail long after it did grow huge. Google kept increasing the number of invites each user could issue, but it didn’t open up the service to all comers until Valentine’s Day, 2007. And Gmail wore its Beta label like a badge of honor until July of 2009.

http://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/
To reiterate: nothing out of the ordinary with any of this. It could succeed, though I have my doubts. I don't see any rush to move a modest amount of money in right now, just to get a quarter percent more interest on it. If I wait a year (at an after tax opportunity cost of about $30 on $15,000), I'll survive.

R

But how is it able to do that? Very little info on what its invested in on M*.
Incidently their "hedged market opportunity" fund is down 12% ytd. So there.
And their tactical allocation "asset rotation" fund is also sucking wind against category.
I also worry because they have fund exclusively devoted to "Robotics & Automation". I immediately think of "Pictet Global Water" fund when I see that, a fund before its time.
I guess IOFAX is unique...maybe time to dabble at little

Please don’t. We have been talking about this fund for a year now here and there and now you suddenly want to dabble???

FYI: Bloomberg View columnist Barry Ritholtz interviews Joel Greenblatt, co-founder of Formula Investing LLC and managing principal, co-chief investment officer and portfolio manager at Gotham Short Strategies and Gotham Asset Management LLC. He has also been a director of Pzena Investment Management Inc. since October 2007. An adjunct professor at Columbia Business School since 1996, he teaches classes on value and special situation investing. He is the author of “You Can Be A Stock Market Genius,” “The Little Book That Beats the Market,” “The Little Book That Still Beats the Market” and “The Big Secret for the Small Investor.”
Regards,
Ted
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2018-04-20/joel-greenblatt-discusses-the-thrill-of-investing
Transcript:
http://ritholtz.com/2018/04/transcript-joel-greenblatt/
M*: Gotham Family Of Funds: (Investment Minimum $250,000) - (Investor Class $2,500 (GNNDX))
http://quicktake.morningstar.com/fundfamily/gotham/0C000091OF/fund-list.aspx
Gotham Funds Website:
https://www.gothamfunds.com/strategy.aspx

@Crash- That's why I posted the article re the "Dark Grey Swan". When that area starts falling apart what are the odds that it will take the whole offshore shebang down with it, at least temporarily, as everyone runs for the exits?

There’s so many potential black (or gray) swans out there that I stopped counting.
(Specifically, I stopped November 8, 2016.)

@VintageFreak,
The 2016 drop can be better observed by creating a 2016 -2018 chart shown here.

Here's a link to the Forbes article. Hard to believe this type of business model will succeed, and they share very little about the business model...all very vague and feel good.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2017/09/18/high-yield-online-savings-account-beam/#680354443531

Hello,
Last week Old_Skeet's market barometer finished the week with a reading of 155 indicating the the S&P 500 Index was undervalued. Not much has changed as this week as it finished at 154. However, there was a big move in the US 10 YR Treasury which has moved over the past four weeks from a yield of 2.74% to 2.96%. For me to be a buyer in equities I'll need to see a reading of around 160 on the barometer's scale and perhaps a little higher. I'm thinking the reason for rise in yield is due to our Govenment's spending was greater than its tax receipts. Thus the need to print money which is inflationary.
Some of the things that performed well, for me, last week were my large cap growth funds, my commodity strategy fund and my regional bank fund pick. In addition, my convertible securities fund was up about 0.50%.
Wishing all ... "Good Investing."
Old_Skeet

FYI: We have just learned that the median salary of employees at Amazon.com Inc. is $28,446, excluding its chief executive officer and founder, Jeff Bezos. That pitiful number raises an intriguing question: Is Amazon a high-paying tech company or a low-wage retailer?
Regards,
Ted
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-20/amazon-bezos-net-worth-may-be-100-billion-times-that-of-workers
Amazon Subscribers Worldwide:
http://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Screen-Shot-2018-04-20-at-12.53.17-PM.png