Investment manager AtlasTrend has turned to the smart speaker system Google Home in a bid to increase engagement with its investor content. Investors will be able to use voice activation technology to inquire about stocks in their portfolio and general investment topics.

AtlasTrend has been in the market since 2015, offering four global thematic equity portfolios: the Online Shopping Spree Fund; Big Data Big Fund; Splurging Baby Boomers Fund; and Healthy Lifestyle Fund.

Its funds under management are “in the millions”, according to the company’s co-founder Kent Kwan.

AtlasTrend’s top-performing fund is the Online Shopping Spree Fund, which is up 26.9 per cent over the 12 months to the end of February.

AtlasTrend also offers a “membership” for non-investors. For $10 a month members have access to regular investment commentaries, stock reports and strategy insights.

The idea is to convert these members to investors over time. But like a lot of other investment managers, Atlas Trend has discovered that engagement with the content is not what they would have hoped for.

Kwan, a former JP Morgan portfolio manager, says the group’s testing has demonstrated that engagement with voice activated content is higher.

“We have given people a lot of content over the past couple of years. What we have learned is that a lot of people are not engaged,” Kwan says.

“We tried audio and video and got more engagement, and that led us to voice activation.”

The new service, Astro, runs on Google Home and includes stock reports, market commentaries, investment market roundups and strategy insights.

Kwan says AtlasTrend has 3000 people on its platform, both investors and non-investor members.

It has no ongoing management fee and charges 10 basis points for fund expenses. It charges a performance fee of 15 per cent on gains (with no hurdle), which is applied to individual investors when they realise gains.