Why robots probably won’t take your job yet, monthly reports and things we found interesting

Our Funds delivered mixed returns last month. Fund reports are available below.

Once again, the main story in September was interest rates. Bond rates rose, both locally and globally, as investors increased the probability of near-term interest rate rises to bring inflation back into the target range.

In Australia the RBA increased the cash rate by 0.25% to 4.60%. The Australian 10 year bond rate increased from 5.0% to 5.3%, which is the highest level since 2011. In the United States the Federal Reserve increased the Fed Funds rate by 0.25% to 3.75%–4.00%, its first increase in three years.

These rate rises generally had a negative impact on equity markets.

In other news this month, we explain why robots probably won’t take your job yet but a computer might and look at how much internet content is now AI assisted.

Should you wish to invest in any of our funds this month, head to the Invest Now page on our website to apply online or download paper forms. See below for the calendar of cut-off dates for this month. Applications received by the cut-off dates will be effective from 1 November.

As always, thanks for reading. If you have any questions or feedback, reply to this email or give us a call.

Regards,

Daryl, Greg and the Affluence Team.

Affluence Funds Returns

Affluence Investment Fund

Our flagship Fund is highly diversified and can invest across all asset classes. The portfolio includes an allocation to each of our other funds, plus over 20 different underlying managers and other investments selected by Affluence. The strategy seeks a balance between maximising returns, delivering monthly income and lowering volatility.

Affluence Income Trust

This Fund provides access to a highly diversified fixed income portfolio, targeting monthly distributions and preservation of capital over rolling 3 year periods.

Affluence LIC Fund

This Fund provides access to a specialised strategy that invests in a diversified portfolio of 20 to 35 ASX Listed Investment Companies (LICs) and other discount capture opportunities.

The Fund aims to deliver quarterly distributions of at least 5% per annum, and to outperform the ASX 200 Accumulation Index over time.  

Affluence Small Company Fund

The Fund provides access to ASX Small Companies via a portfolio comprising direct investments, plus selected holdings in smaller LICs and unlisted funds focused on smaller companies.

The Fund is available only to Eligible Investors and aims to deliver quarterly distributions of at least 5% per annum, and to outperform the ASX Small Ordinaries Accumulation Index over time.

Application and Withdrawals

To make a new investment, add to your existing investment or arrange a withdrawal from any of our Funds, head to our Invest page. There you can apply online or download paper forms.

Cut-off dates for October 2026 Applications and Withdrawals this month are shown below.

Fund In Focus

Affluence Investment Fund

The Affluence Investment Fund is our all-weather fund, bringing together our best ideas across all asset classes. It has been quietly delivering results for over eleven years.  

It is managed with the mindset of a family office or endowment fund. It seeks to achieve above average medium and long-term returns while paying monthly distributions and reducing risk using diversification and other strategies.

Our investment mandate for the Fund is very wide. We combine a variable allocation to our three specialist funds, with a range of our best investment ideas across all asset classes. The result is an all-weather portfolio that can deliver in differing market conditions, including:  

• A blend of defensive and growth assets, with a strong value bias.  
• A focus on differentiated investment strategies.  
• Access to over 30 underlying managers and thousands of underlying investments.  

We aim for the portfolio to be highly diversified by asset class, underlying manager, investment strategy, geography, liquidity, and investment structure. 

We believe that to achieve better than average returns, you need to invest differently. We believe that value investing works best in the long run. We believe that being aware of long term cycles can significantly improve performance. And we believe that success requires a long term focus, which in turn requires patience and discipline. 

If you share those beliefs, the Fund may be suitable for you. 

The Fund is designed to be used as a Core or Satellite Component of an investment portfolio for those investors seeking Capital Growth and Income Distributions with a Medium or longer investment timeframe, at least a Medium risk/return profile and needing access to capital Monthly or less often. 

You can learn more about the Fund from the Fund Page on our website which you can access by clicking below. Let us know if you would like us to call you to discuss the Fund in more detail.

Things we found interesting

Chart of the month

Pew Research checked the text of 10,000 webpages randomly selected from the internet. Almost 10% showed signs of AI authorship.

One in ten might not sound a lot. But remember a lot of content on the internet predated ChatGPT and couldn’t have been written by AI. So Pew Research filtered out old webpages and only looked at pages published after the release of ChatGPT. On that basis, the trend is even more pronounced. Around 35% of pages published after ChatGPT was released showed signs of AI influence. This is in line with other studies that have shown that large shares of recently published pages on the internet were likely written or substantially edited by AI.

The two biggest giveaways for AI driven content are em dashes “–“ and negative parallelisms used to structure a comparison (“it’s not just X, it’s Y”).

Chart of the month 2

The five largest US companies are huge. The have a similar combined weight in the MSCI All Country World Index, to the six biggest countries combined (excluding the US).

NVIDIA has the same weighting as the entire Japanese market. Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet are all individually larger than every country except Japan.

Robots are probably not coming for your job (just yet)

A recent paper released by ChatGPT competitor Anthropic, concluded that robots can only currently do about 0.3% of all jobs in the US economy cost effectively. While robots are able to perform three-quarters of physical tasks, making up 34% of working hours, they can mostly only do so in limited settings, or they are currently much more expensive than human labour. 

If robot price declines follow past trends, it will take 40 years for the robot job share to reach 10%. Beyond price, factors including capabilities, preferences, and regulations pose further barriers to robot automation. 

Driving and warehouse jobs are examples of jobs highly likely to be replicable by currently available robots. Nursing and general repair jobs are not, since present-day robots can do little of that type of work, even in highly controlled environments.The bottom line is that physical work is harder to automate than you would expect. Almost all jobs are bundles of simple and complicated tasks. Robots that can only handle the simple part cannot do the whole job. Much of what we do is highly interpersonal or requires physical skills that robots simply don’t yet have.

The conclusion is that if you do physical work, robots are probably not coming for your job just yet. Very few jobs are a single automatable task or tasks. Rather, almost all jobs are a mess of tasks, many of which are hard to physically replicate or require complicated judgements.

If we include large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, the picture is more startling. According to Anthropic, about 80% of US job tasks by working time are exposed to either robots or LLMs, which is why office jobs are much more vulnerable than physical jobs.

Vaguely interesting facts.

Astound your friends with these morsels of knowledge:

• Most wasabi served outside Japan isn’t real – it’s a horseradish based substitute.
• Every zebra has its own unique stripe pattern, much like a human fingerprint.
• Astronomers have discovered clouds in space containing alcohol. 
• There are more than 17,000 islands in Indonesia.
• Ancient Romans had fast-food shops.*
  

* Almost 2,000 years ago, Romans were buying ready-to-eat meals from establishments known as thermopolia. These were street-side snack bars serving food and drinks from masonry counters fitted with large pottery jars. At least 80 examples have been identified in Pompeii alone. 

Eating out was common among the middle and lower classes, so these shops served an everyday need. Archaeologists found remains of duck, pig, goat, fish, snails and crushed beans, giving us clues about what customers ate. 

At one Pompeii snack bar, excavators found almost three kilograms of coins in one of the counter’s jars, and many thermopolia were attached to reasonably expansive residences. It seems that fast food operators could achieve considerable social standing in Pompeii. Selling lunch could apparently get you somewhere in life. 

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