During this time of year in the Upper Midwest one can say if you don’t like the weather—wait a day. With the jet stream bouncing above and below us in rapid order like so many Vikings passes, our weather can go from frustrating to fine in the short-term often before we can react to it. It reminds us of the market.

The question we have is that with the rise of computerized trading and artificial intelligence, are we mere humans getting beat in short-term investing? Despite The Rise of the Machines, these devices do have to be programmed by some lowly carbon-based life form somewhere. But the software can be programmed without the personal biases of humans and can take into consideration several different investment styles modeled after some of the best investors in those styles.

But what time frame do we use to measure investing success? Humans can’t compute and execute trades like a co-located multimillion dollar computer over the very short-term. Keeping that in mind, how do we humans get an edge? We think that over the medium-to-longer term people have a distinct edge because we have the ability to think abstractly, determine which company managers are superior, analyze evolving business models that may succeed, and many other qualitative factors. Experience coupled with common sense are impossible to program. Let’s not forget that good ‘ol fashioned Graham and Dodd investing usually works over the long term.

However, those of us in the industry don’t always have the long-term on our side. We have lots of constituents to keep happy—now. Therefore bits and bytes can be easily considered our competition in the short-term. But most wealth is created over the long-term, so conceptually computers need to “fear” us.

What do you think? Can humans get an edge in the short-term? Will artificial intelligence win out in the long-term someday?