How Can Robot Investment Assistant Help : Collecting Information or Providing Advice? Evidence from China

Robot investment assistants (RIAs), equipped at various investment platforms, are designed to help individual investors with investment decisions by providing information and advices. Using account level data between 2020 and 2021 from the largest investment platform in China, we examine the values of different services provided by the RIAs. In general, higher overall usage of RIAs is associated with higher future raw and risk-adjusted returns, higher diversification, and higher risk-taking for the individual investors. Among various RIA services, the advice services, rather than the information services, have larger influences on future trading activities and returns. It’s possible that the simple advices provided by RIAs are easier to understand and follow than the large quantity of information from RIAs. We find no definite evidence that the existing RIA services remove behavioral biases