New Listings: Pictet Has Taught a Computer to Pick Stocks, and WisdomTree Has Given the Same Fund Two Names

The most striking thing about the latest batch of new listings is not the leverage. For once, nobody is offering to multiply your regrets by five. The striking thing is that one of the world's oldest private banks has decided the future of stock selection is to hand it to a machine, and then to sell you that machine four or five different ways.

Pictet AI Enhanced Equity, in every flavour you could want (PQUS, PQWD, PDWD, PQWX, PDWX, LSE)

Pictet has been managing money since the era of the horse and cart, and it has now arrived at the following conclusion: the humans should step aside and let the algorithm have a go. These are actively managed funds where the "active" part is an artificial intelligence model that selects and weights the stocks. The word "Enhanced" is doing a lot of quiet work there.

What I admire is the sheer completeness of the rollout. There is a US version. There is a World version. There is a World ex-US version, for the investor who wants global equities but has some very specific feelings about America. Several of these come in both accumulating and distributing share classes, which is how you end up with five separate lines and a set of tickers that read like the output of the very model doing the picking. PQUS, PQWD, PDWD, PQWX, PDWX. Somewhere a machine is choosing stocks, and somewhere else a human was clearly asked to choose the tickers and gave up.

I have no strong view on whether an AI can beat the market. I have a very strong view that we are going to find out, in triplicate, on the London Stock Exchange.

WisdomTree Global High Dividend, now available under two different tickers (DIVW and WDIV, LSE)

This one is refreshingly comprehensible. It is a global fund that buys high-dividend companies across developed markets and weights them by the cash they actually pay out, rather than by whatever a press release promises. Fundamentally weighted, valuation-disciplined, the kind of product that has a legitimate reason to exist.

The only wrinkle is that the same strategy arrives wearing two ticker badges, DIVW and WDIV, which are the same four letters reshuffled like a mildly cursed anagram. One accumulates your dividends, one hands them back to you. Both are the same underlying idea. I spent a genuinely unreasonable amount of time working out that they were not, in fact, two different funds. Consider this my public service so you do not have to.

And finally, the UBS SPI Extra ETF (SPIEXT, SIX Swiss Exchange)

Here is the fund I keep coming back to. The SPI Extra covers the Swiss market excluding its three giant blue chips, which means it is a clean, low-drama way to own the mid and small-cap slice of one of the most sensible equity markets in the world. No leverage multiplier. No algorithm choosing your holdings. No second ticker for the same thing. It does not even have a buzzword in the name, unless you count "Extra," which in this company almost qualifies as one.

Listed in the same wave as five AI-driven funds and a product whose ticker is a type of memory, it sits there quietly, doing exactly what it says on the label: exposure to Swiss companies you have mostly never heard of, at a fair price.