Apart from the Mergers and Acquisition process and other parts of banking (see previous posts), stock picking is becoming driven by A.I: and human stock pickers are being laid off at Black Rock, one of the largest investment firms globally.

Now, after years of deliberations, Laurence D. Fink, a founder and chief executive of BlackRock, has cast his lot with the machines. On Tuesday, BlackRock laid out an ambitious plan to consolidate a large number of actively managed mutual funds with peers that rely more on algorithms and models to pick stocks.

This has been part of a larger trend for years, showing that most fund managers do not outcompete indices after cost:

Last year, for example, $423 billion left actively managed stock funds and $390 billion poured into index funds, according to Morningstar.

At BlackRock, Machines Are Rising Over Managers to Pick Stocks

By Score one for the machines. The largest fund company in the world, BlackRock, has faced a thorny challenge since it acquired the exchange-traded-fund business from Barclays in 2009. These low cost, computer-driven funds have exploded in growth, leaving in the dust the stock pickers who had spurred an earlier expansion for the firm.