I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
(And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?)
So, from a time savings perspective you would want a fund that specializes in home robotics. If one of those exists, though, that suggests that your knowledge isn't as unique as you'd like.
What I would probably do is find a news website for home robotics producers- a trade magazine is what used to fill this niche, and might still do so- to have a good idea of how relative companies are doing. This looks like a promising place to start, but that gets you as informed as similar investors, and you'd like to be more informed.
Then, try to keep a portfolio that's fairly balanced in all noteworthy home robotics companies. I'd probably go the 'buy and hold' route- try and keep your portfolio roughly apportioned relative to market share by buying up shares of companies underrepresented in your portfolio every month. This is the 'indexing' approach- basically, you trust that the home robotics market as a whole will go up, and that the market is better at predicting who will go up than you will.
If you're more confident in your ability to predict trends, you want to hold companies relative to their expected market share at the end of your trading period- to use an old example, the first strategy would have you holding lots of Blockbuster and some Netflix and the second strategy would have you holding lots of Netflix and some Blockbuster.
There is a giant obstacle here, though, which is that a large part of the stock price is determined by the financials of the company, which take a relatively large investment of time and energy to understand. If you're indexing, you basically offload this work to other investors; if you do it yourself, you can have a decent idea of what the companies are worth on the books, and then adjust by your estimate of how well they'll do in the near future.
If I was keeping my porfolio indexed to the market, wouldn't I be selling Blockbuster shares each month as Blockbuster lost market share? Why would I end up holding lots of Blockbuster?