Royal Mail will find it hard to deliver on expectations Sometimes you just know when the letter hits the mat that it carries bad news. That, or junk mail. Investors should have taken a closer look at Royal Mail's prospectus when it dropped through the post box just over a year ago. There, on page 13, in paragraph D. 1, bullet point 12, lies the warning that hit the postal operator's shares on Wednesday. Royal Mail, it says, "faces risks from . . . existing customers of the Group's parcel delivery businesses, establishing their own delivery capability." Nicely bland and buried in a long list of hypotheticals, who would have guessed that it disguised Amazon's ambitions to run Postman Pat off the road? Or at the very least to hijack some of his most lucrative deliveries? Moya Greene, chief executive, has done a great job whipping Britain's venerable postal group into the shape that allowed it to be privatised last year. The trouble now is the parcels growth story that fuelled huge demand for shares - and led to accusations that it had been sold on the cheap - looks about as reliable as the British weather. Sure, the postal group may be more efficient than it was. It has had to be with the letters business in structural decline. And Royal Mail still has an advantage, given its dominant share of Britain's parcels market. But not even Ms Greene can deny that its 38 per cent market share by revenue looks unsustainable unless it moves pretty quickly to win customers who somehow had previously escaped its notice. Delivering on investors" expectations is likely to get even more difficult in the run up to a general election next year. Few politicians would be brave enough to abolish, reduce or even subsidise the public service obligation that weighs so heavily on Royal Mail's ability to compete with new, more aggressive rivals. And it is hard to imagine any new government condoning the aggressive cost-cutting - in other words, jobs - that will be required to deliver better returns for shareholders. Christmas, when we head to the local post office to send and receive gifts, should be the season to be jolly about Royal Mail. Instead, it looks like the Grinches are plotting to steal even that small pleasure. Rise of the robotrader By 2050, robots using computers that execute 100tn instructions per second will start rivalling human intelligence, according to Scientific American. The one thing they will not do, however, is take prospective clients to strip clubs. ICAP, the interdealer broker has been burnt more than once by the bad behaviour of some of its human traders. Just look at the fine it paid for manipulating Libor. No wonder its founder and chairman Michael Spencer is turning to robotraders to replace the flesh and blood armies that once animated trading rooms. Over the past five years the number of human brokers at ICAP has halved to fewer than 2,000. The advantages of having robots on the payroll go beyond clean living. They do not demand big bonuses that eat into profits. And pooling supply and demand on an electronic platform makes a market more transparent and, arguably, pricing fairer. Nevertheless robots are no panacea. If automated systems are not policed well enough there is the chance that some clever rival robotrader might exploit trading patterns, just as with humans. Failures here can lead to reputational risk as Barclays discovered to its cost. And while robots may not want bonuses, technology requires constant investment. ICAP had to spend £29m in the first half alone. Finally, an interdealer broker's value lies in personal networks. Strip clubs aside, traders are good at bringing in new business. Such bonds could be harder to break than those between robot and client. Automated trading may be good for profitability, but challenges remain. There is hope for us humans yet. At least, until robots learn to lunch. Game of phones When the time comes to upgrade your mobile do you: 1) Declare your undying love of your service provider and lock in for another five years. 2) Look for the best deal on price and capability no matter who the carrier is. Chances are you ticked the second option and you would not be unusual. It is estimated that just one-third of subscribers are loyal to their carriers. But would users be as promiscuous if they knew that the latest series of Game of Thrones came with their next subscription? It might also encourage customers to use more high margin data and faster broadband. Yet Vodafone's chief executive Vittorio Colao is right to warn that the net effect for operators is likely to be higher costs. With everyone from Netflix to Sky, and now mobile operators, chasing content, the prices for the best programmes can only go up. And, in the longer term, that could well mean higher prices for mobile subscribers as well.