Mechanical Investing

See: Black Box Investing.

"Mechanical," as in: a computer, following an algorithm, does the investing for ya.

Good idea? Bad idea? Well, historically, mechanical or "black box" investing works just fine...until it doesn't. Meaning that there aren't enough algorithms in existence or means of writing them, such that they can predict all the human curveball odd behaviors that exist in the world. So they tend to do just fine for a time...and then do all the wrong things at the wrong time, and wipe out all the gains they'd made in the past in one fell swoop.

The system is getting better at being predictive. Artificial Intelligence will let computers more or less write their own predictive algorithms in the future. But for now, vastly Caveat Emptor when it comes to giving over your retirement money to a computer versus an index fund or ETF.