I've been researching robo-advisors quite a bit recently. They are really interesting and innovative.
I'll preface by saying that I have been talking to a lot of financial planners (at top-tier institutions). They basically set you up with a good set of ETFs, hedge funds, etc. and rebalance occasionally. Sometimes they do tax-loss harvesting. They also provide a few other nice little services. But at the end of the day, their fees are over 1% unless you have an ultra high net-worth.
In comparison, Wealthfront can automate huge strategies for a fraction of the cost (0.25%). For example:
- Direct Indexing (invest in an index by buying the stocks directly instead of a fund)
- Automatic investing, rebalancing, and tax-loss harvesting (including TLHing individual stocks within an index when paired with direct indexing)
- Coordinating trades between retirement and taxable accounts for optimal tax savings
- Smart beta (a custom weighted indexing algorithm)
Yes, a financial planner can do all of this (although most don't). But when they do, they just use automated software to do it. It would be impossible to implement these strategies manually. So why even go with a financial planner when Wealthfront does the same thing, but better/cheaper?
I started with and was a Wealthfront customer for many years. I'm appreciative and credit them with starting my education and understanding on investing.
What caused me to leave?
- They aren't global portfolio aware. Bonds belong in tax advantaged accounts, then taxable. If you've maxed out your 401k/IRAs in Bonds that $ as an absolute percentage should be accounted for in your taxable portfolio construction.
- They don't let you opt out of asset classes. Aka I don't want additional REITs because I have RE exposure already.
- They overly hype tax loss harvesting. It's good to have, but a byproduct of portfolio management not the goal.
- They launched and pushed risky products as a way to increase their fees.
Once you understand what's going on under the hood this isn't complicated to manage yourself with a few ETFs/MFs.
(The direct indexing is awesome and would love to have that back)
I've heard that when you leave direct indexing you end up with all the individual stocks in your new portfolio, or you have to sell them and eat the capital gains tax. Was that your experience?
You can opt out of asset classes now. I moved out of Wealthfront to save money and try to DIY but so far I've had a really hard time doing it in terms of finding time to place the buy order during the workday and doing tax loss harvesting without wash sales.
Why do bonds being in tax advantages accounts? My gut would suspect the opposite, since on average stocks will have higher return so you'll want them getting the tax break.
"Bonds belong in tax advantaged accounts, then taxable."
That's true when say taxable bonds are yielding 8% and municipal bonds 6%. But when taxable bonds are yielding 2% (about the current 10-year U.S. Treasury yield), the tax hit from owning them in a taxable account is small, and maybe the growth assets such as stocks belong in a Roth IRA.
Many people who start off with Robos like Wealthfront actually leave once their net worth rises and pay more for human advisors.
If you need to invest a small/decent amount of money into stocks, Robos work wonderfully. It's a mass production angle -- good quality service at lower cost to many people; the Ford Model T of investing. Early robot just had a couple of investment options, and now there are more options but the same concept of limited choice at scale (Mustangs, Minvans, Trucks in my example)
Once you have estate planning and complicated tax issues, human advisors provide a lot of guidance to people that is hyper specific to you and your location / niche, which Robos just don't cover. Wealthfront, for example, won't arbitrate a dispute between beneficiaries of a family trust.
I think lawyers are a good comparison here. If you need some standard cookie-cutter incorporation docs, there's a bunch of websites where you can get some core documents for free or a few hundred dollars. But if you're afraid of making the wrong choice, or if you're in a situation that goes beyond the common scenarios (like M&A), then you hire a lawyer to provide you personalized advice.
Yes, completely agree. That happens when all of the other estate planning costs begin to vastly outweigh the cost of investment advising. I'm no expert, but I am under the impression that although these automated strategies are a smaller part of the whole picture for high net-worth individuals, the strategies are still the same.
I'm interested to see if UBS can add value in those ways you mentioned, while still using sophisticated automated strategies for cost savings purposes.
Also note that Vanguard, JPM, Schwab, Fidelity etc. are getting in the robo-advising/direct indexing game.
I left Wealthfront and now have about $6M in assets. I'm self-managing with mostly Vanguard funds. My experience with financial advisors has not been great.
> Once you have estate planning and complicated tax issues, human advisors provide a lot of guidance to people that is hyper specific to you and your location / niche, which Robos just don't cover. Wealthfront, for example, won't arbitrate a dispute between beneficiaries of a family trust.
I agree fully that estate planning/making a trust is something most people would benefit from a human advisor, but this is something you can target with an estate lawyer. I don't think this is something you would need advice on regular basis.
For taxes, I am guessing vast majority of people, even wealthy people, never need human advice nowadays. Anything that is just combination of W2+1099DIV+1099B+1099INT+1099NEC is handled well with robo tools. Tax loss harvesting is pretty simple (even without robo advising!) as long as you know wash sale rules and distinction between long/short term capital gains.
You can pay for both human advisors and robo-investing. A human advisor will charge 1% of assets to manage your money for you, and the results may not differ much from what the robot picks at much lower cost. I'm happy with the robot's asset allocation and I pay an expert for taxes, trusts, and so on.
* Edward Jones will do it for you for ~ 2%/yr, which is ridiculously high.
* Any of the big banks or brokerages will do it for less than Edward Jones.
* Almost any financial advisor will do it for about 1%/yr in fees(not ridiculously high, but not remotely cheap) or fee-based for a few hundred an hour with a 1st time setup of $4-10k, more than $10k is unreasonable.
* The robo advisors(of which their are dozens with basically identical products, generally charge 0.3%/yr, some like Vanguard include Financial Advisor services.
* At least one firm will do it for $200 first year and $100/yr after that, regardless of the balance of your accounts, and provide financial & tax planning/advice/etc included. They do require a little work on your part. I'm actively looking for more subscription based advisors like this, please PM me!
* Bogleheads.org will do it for free as long as you follow their template.
> At least one firm will do it for $200 first year and $100/yr after that
Can you share that one? PM me if preferred. I'm on a similar quest and so far I've found pretty much everything else you've found. My wife is a high income earner too and she's happy with the 1%/yr people that she likes, but I think we can get similar results for noticeably less.
Even 0.5% would be reasonable. As you know, from $1m to $2m that 1% fee goes from $10k to $20k and they're not doing anything more for that extra $10k/yr so the value proposition starts to break down for me. $10k in one year isn't a big deal, but over 20 years that's $200k, which might affect my retirement activities and definitely impacts how much is left for my kids (which they're going to really appreciate as life is so much more expensive for their generation).
There's Facet Wealth, who will take ~$200/month flat fee up until around 1M AUM (or with extra complexity) to do the same. You get good personal contact on a regular basis, but it feels bad to spend 2400/yr just for "yeah you're on the right track, this is it" every quarter once everything is in the appropriate vanguard target date funds and such.
>> Yes, a financial planner can do all of this (although most don't). But when they do, they just use automated software to do it. It would be impossible to implement these strategies manually. So why even go with a financial planner when Wealthfront does the same thing, but better/cheaper?
Thats the 100$B question right? Because fear. Because unfamiliarity. Also because 1% seems small, but its really more like 14% (if the average return is 7%, you're giving up 1/7 of your return!)
What's funny is... whenever you call an FA (financial advisor) in a moment of panic... they answer always is "don't act emotionally and stick to the plan". Maybe a real "robo-advisor" should just be a chatbot that responds to any message it gets with "HODL".
>> Because unfamiliarity.
This one is going to be interesting to watch evolve and I see it becoming less of an edge for financial advisors. More and more, we are seeing retail investors gain familiarity (not saying knowledge... but at least familiarity) with financial markets through blogs, social media, etc. I think we are moving to a world of more self-directed investors than advised investors.
The difference between 7% & 6% (1% fees) is in fact a LOT higher if one takes compounding into effect.
By Year 40:
* >$500K &
* ALMOST a quarter of the portfolio
When I was starting out, someone in my company's 401k forum mentioned this # (at that time the # was almost 40%, fees have gone down a lot since the early 2000's). And I am glad I paid attention.
I try and pass on this wisdom everytime I can. Now, you can too.
I know someone who's been doing wealth management for like 20 or 30 years now. Based on what they've told me, I'd separate clients roughly into 3 categories:
1. people who don't want to think about it - they pay for everything to be taken care of properly
2. people who want to be wined and dined - they end up paying to be taken out to dinner a few times a year and hear about what the firm is doing to survive bear markets and how they're taking advantage of bull markets
3. people who think they're smarter than everyone and want to direct everything - these people are probably moving to more self serve options, but plenty still want to tell a human what trades to make
Also at a certain net worth, tax and estate planning is a huge part of the work.
The wined and dined people also often really don't want to deal with a website and they want someone to call who can "get things done" if needed.
So for wealthfront and friends, let's say a family member is closing on a property purchase. You said you'd put in $500K. Closing comes and you try to wire the money over. But wait, it doesn't work.
1) First you have to sell investments
2) Trades have to SETTLE (T+2 or more)!
3) Then and only then can you initiate an ACH transfer.
4) It can only go to your own account in some cases (T+1/T+2)
5) Then you have to go to you bank and get a wire out (retail banks often have tight cutoffs or end up delayed if going online while they "approve" this).
6) This all can be stressful on closing day (agents calling, escrow calling, bank calling, your relative calling). Now you are not days but a week late.
vs
Talking with someone. They enable margin account if you don't have one, you wire same day, done or you can give your guys name to everyone to help coordinate if needed if it will be a bit late.
I was a happy Wealthfront & Turbotax user for a long time, but then my taxes got more complicated, I wanted to create a family bank using life insurance as a backer, do estate planning, I moved between states, needed to move IRAs around, and changed jobs recently. Those services were great when things were simple, but I totally got pushed into #1 really quickly. I already didn't want to click around in any tools and a bit of complexity quickly made hiring someone a great investment even if the fees are higher. I can schedule a call anytime I want, get very easy to interpret summaries of my portfolio, and he's helping me getting the right people to the table for a potential investment property purchase. Computers are great, but sometimes a human is good too.
>Curious why you would need to coordinate trades been taxable and retirement accounts?
If you treat your retirement and taxable accounts as one big pot of money, you want to place assets to take the most advantage of the retirement account. For example, they mentioned bonds. Since yield on bonds is taxable at income tax levels every year, you want to prefer holding them in the tax exempt account.
Another reason is because of tax loss harvesting. To make that work, you have to avoid wash sales. The wash sale rule applies to you and every account you own, taxable, retirement, across brokers, etc. So to make TLH work, the broker needs to have a complete view.
>The biggest question to me, you can trade ETFs for free now, why do you need wealthfront at all?
For me, I'm on the west coast, so the market is open from 6:30 AM to 1 PM. I can't really monitor it nearly as closely as I'd really prefer. Looking at my betterment history, last year they automated 275 transactions for me. I can really only be bothered to look at the account once a month or so. Do the efficiency gains from a lower drift get me 0.25% additional value? Hard to say, but probably not. However, TLH absolutely has. I wouldn't trust myself to track that properly at all.
The speculation online is that it's because they lowered the minimum for their institution class funds, many large employer retirement funds sold their holdings of the non-institution funds, leaving everyone left with large capital gains and hence large tax bills unless you held it in a 401k/IRA.
I find Wealthfront to be overkill, but this is precisely the kind of thing they'd save you from.
Thing is, all of these are simple enough that anyone with a tiny bit of financial knowledge or Googling can do it for themselves. Sure a lot of people don't bother, but when your investment size starts going up the 0.25%-1% commission is a LOT of money.
Study after study has shown that investing in a broad market fund plus occasional (once a quarter) rebalancing is going to beat managed investing on average. So where do these products fit in really?
The folks using WealthFront don't have enough money invested that 1% is a lot of money, and they generally very much suffer from lack of time or knowledge on how to invest properly (or willingness/ability to sit down, learn, and DIY properly either).
Well, actually a lot of these strategies are really hard to implement on your own. For example, in direct indexing you are buying hundreds of stocks in an attempt to replicate an indexing. You are also constantly rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting.
You could definitely just buy an index fund, but it's not exactly comparable.
My experience was that robo-investors are great until you need something special. Then they can become rather painful.
Exmaple: I got divorced last year. Betterment took weeks of time and many phones calls until they were able to figure out a way to divide our assets evenly, without a large difference in cost basis. Their automatic algorithm for dividing accounts just didn't know how to handle it.
If UBS figures out how to offer a higher level of service on top of robo-advising, that could be a real win.
Does Wealthfront actually buy individual stocks? Most robo-advisors buy ETFs. So you're paying double management fees. I'm not aware of any robo-advisors that actually buy individual stocks.
Yes. Once you cross a certain threshold (I think it's $100k portfolio), they'll switch you to "Direct Indexing", which automates individual stock purchases.
Once you cross a threshold of investable assets at which it makes sense (usually a few hundred thousand), most robots have an active indexing strategy in addition to or instead of ETFs.
I agree that robo-advisors are great, but they do leave a lot to be desired. I’m actively working on a service that would drastically change the way people engage with robo-advisory accounts.
I for one prefer to make stock selections on my own, however Wealthfront, Betterment, and Personal Capital do not allow me to manage my own investments with any of the robo-advisory features. There is a huge opportunity in the space.
It would be great to talk to you about it - I’d love to hear your thoughts - any way we can connect?
personally my favorite feature is the "autopilot" thing, which for example dcan automatically withdraw from my checking account and invest when my checking account hits a certain threshold. so for example i can just say "if my checking account goes above $30k, deposit the rest into some wealthfront investment account." i don't think a human financial planner can do this easily? just to add to your list.
That honestly doesn't sound like very much to take 0.25%. Maybe if you're starting out and have $10k to invest, but once you're in the mid six figures or more, the 0.25% adds up.
If you buy and hold, it doesn't take much work and expenses for Vanguard ETFs are ~0.10%. Also, once you move to Wealthfront, it's hard to ever leave because of how they break things up (which, I'm sure, isn't unintentional).
A big advantage of the robos is that they time the rebalancing a little better. Manually rebalancing your own Vanguard ETFs at the same time once a quarter is pretty arbitrary - it's based on what's convenient to you, but it's not necessarily what's mathematically best for your portfolio.
If your allocation percentages remain very stable, you might not need to rebalance at all at the end of a quarter. If your allocations fall way out of whack, you might want to rebalance a portion of your portfolio earlier, and robos handle that timing for you.
I'd be surprised if the better timing doesn't provide 0.25% of value, not to mention it's just one less thing to have to think about.
Does Fidelity have robo-advising? Because all the big companies I've worked at use them for retirement funds, and I've found most of the management is heavily manual at Fidelity.
They do, it's called Fidelity Go. They have a similar product for advisors called AMP. I actually worked on these products a while ago, they're all very similar when it comes down to it.
Super interesting. Wealthfront has approximately $27 billion USD in AUM according to this article [0].
Meanwhile the leading robo-advisor in Canada, WealthSimple recently raised funds at a $5 billion CAD valuation, on a $7.7 billion USD AUM [1].
I have felt for a while like the robo-advisory market is in roadrunner mode - has run past the edge of the cliff but hasn't quite yet fallen. Maybe this is the first sign that the party's ending.
Robo-advisory was a dead business 5+ years ago. The game quickly had to expand to add services on top of the core robo offering. Now the big guys like Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab all have their own robo-flavors. Its become table stakes. In that context, this deal makes sense.
UBS has a $2.6tr+ wealth management division - they need the sexy fintech frontend.
$27B and $8B AUM are both peanuts, and I imagine not a big factor in determining valuation for these robo-advisors. Corporations are likely more interested in the number of users, demographic breakdown (mostly well-off millennials), their financial data, credit profiles and upsell opportunities.
This. The amount of money they manage is a mouse fart in a hurricane when it comes to such low fee business as robo advisory. That a robo advisor can get $5bln valuation on having $8 bln of assets speaks either to the silliness of the valuation or that the value is not in the assets managed (likely a combination of both factors).
It probably depends on what adjacent financial products they are selling and how good of a job they are doing at selling those to existing customers. Wealthfront is always suggesting different financial products, cards, etc. There is little money in managing your money since these are mostly served by large funds like Vanguard, but there is a lot of money in referrals selling you other products. It's possible Wealthsimple is doing much better?
For what it's worth, Wealthsimple exited the US market last year and transferred all their US customers to Betterment. They seem to still be adding new products in Canada though (like a Venmo-like cash transfer system.)
Wealthsimple now has in house advisors who email and call you to discuss your account. There is nothing 'robo' about the business model anymore and instead they are just focused on growing AUM by talking to people and convincing them to move more of their savings/TFSA/RRSP over to them.
I'm honestly shocked at how primitive the big firms' offerings are. For example, JPMChase's bank account is smart enough to see a payroll deposit and give you a comment modal suggesting that you invest the money with JPM's investment platform (YouInvest/whatever)
Log into the investment platform and you're back in 1993. They literally have no drip-investment style offering. They want to charge you 100bps to "manage" your money, or you get a broken/buggy online broker with barely any functionality.
Why the heck isnt JPMChase buying one of these platforms?!?
> Why the heck isnt JPMChase buying one of these platforms?!?]]
Broadly speaking, the retail market can be segmented on two axes: net worth and involvement.
Low net worth, high involvement are day traders: they are profitable through fees, PFOF, et cetera. High net worth, high involvement doesn’t tend to exist long enough to specialise in; they’re, professionals, have better things to do or lose their money.
Low net worth, low involvement is patient capital. Not super profitable per se. But the most likely to develop into the last category: high net worth, low involvement; the money maker.
Robo-advisers targeted the third category. They got more of the first. Those not only bolted to crypto and Robinhood. They also incurred higher costs to the firm while promising less development potential to the fourth category. The actual third category participants, to a large degree, don’t need much more than was available in 1993, or at least are savvy enough not to find themselves paying for it.
>> The actual third category participants, to a large degree, don’t need much more than was available in 1993, or at least are savvy enough not to find themselves paying for it.
I'd disagree with this. In 1993, you couldnt do fractional shares, or auto-invest, or pie-based investments. In 1993, you couldnt purcahse $500/wk of BRKB/AMZN/TSLA because there was no product like that short of paying a mutual fund 150bps. You couldnt tax-loss harvest (like with WealthFront)
You can get that now with M1, FolioFN (GS), ShareBuilder (RIP). It is low investment and high-stickiness.
You're noting net work and involvement and profit, but I think stickiness is another factor to focus on.
My take (as a previous employee at Betterment): Wealthfront/Betterment/et al came out to much fanfare and the promise of disrupting the traditional wealth management industry.
At first, it seemed like they were right. AUM growth was looking like a hockey stick...this caused some panic at the big firms' who hurried to launch their own offerings (this is like 2015-ish) which were minimal at best, and still mostly just "marketing products" - a thin roboadvisor veneer designed to drive users into their traditional businesses.
Over the next 2-5 years and up to now, it is becoming/has become obvious that roboadvisors are not, in fact, going to disrupt the industry and it's rather a race to the bottom in pricing with razor thin (or non-existent) margins...so the actual robos have largely stagnated and the big firms stopped investing into their own solutions.
Agree in general, and I think they were great M&A opportunities for the big firms. Think of Banking+Lending+Investments as a natural stack over much like Photo+Music+Games+News+CloudStorage are in the FAANG world. They keep the user sticky. Once you've got Photo+Music+Games+News+CloudStorage in the Apple ecosystem, or in the Google Ecosystem, for example, you're way less likely to leave.
Yet in banking, there arent great stacks where you can keep your relationship across the board. For JPMC, an acquisition of a Betterment or WealthFront (or others) would be a drop in the bucket.
They can’t compete at scale for small potato clients. They want high net worth people to work with a guy. Ie the stereotypical dentist.
Honestly it’s probably a good thing. Chase is pretty awful at basic retail banking. Really only makes sense if you live in Manhattan or something where there are like 3 mega banks in every corner.
I'm surprised to hear this take. I find Chase to be the best bank I've ever worked with -- personal accounts, business accounts, everything. Customer service is top notch. Website is great. I'd love to hear your choices for a top retail bank.
Yes, i'm in the NY area, so true on branch location issue. But how often do you have to visit a branch if you have good systems? The branch is usually for when systems fail.
Not the best lending bank, and def not the best investment platform. I'm not sure why they cant be all three (organic or m&a) given the high synergy.
I suspect you are on to something. Maybe they were waiting for valuations to return to earth? The make versus buy decision was much harder when these platforms were richly valued.
I could a lot of acquisitions in the coming months as capital moves out of growth at all costs fintech space and startups need a lifeline.
I think the "build" can be considered a clear failure at this point, it would take 10min on the JPM "platform" to see that. Not acquiring ShareBuilder was a major loss, especially given that CapitalOne purchased ShareBuilder, took the customers, and killed the platform. Not sure why the platform couldnt have been spun off to JPM (?except perhaps competition?)
GS purchased FolioFN, which was a lesser player, but still a decent platform. JPM is going to have to gulp down M1 Finance and pay for being so slow to the acquisition game <-- My prediction!
Online brokerages selling order flow are very profitable, so even the "buy" decision seems like a no-brainer given the obvious monetization route. DRIP-style investment is even stickier -- you set it and forget it. Make it part of the Premier/Sapphire tiers and people dont want to move at all.
Wealthfront was an attempt to automate that while adding some bells and whistles on top; tax loss harvesting, smart beta, etc.
Curious to see how they succeed as part of UBS. I thought Marcus/Goldman was going to buy them personally, so a bit surprised UBS is getting in on this game.
When I looked at it the fees were way to high to justify to bogelheads.
What is strange to me about robo advisors is that they are still charging a management fee instead of a flat fee. The algorithms are really basic and don’t have any real time changes so it seems weird to charge 25-50 basis points for what’s basically just an interview and time based rebalancing with some formulas that aren’t really better than existing ETFs.
I’ve been expecting this to just be a feature for vanguard and fidelity since the “advise” could just be client side automation rules that nobody wants to build.
boglehead here. Switched off of Wealthfront awhile back. AFAIK they wouldn't outperform a three-fund portfolio.
I actually wouldn't mind a platform that uses my brokerage as a backend and lets me do % allocations on 3~4 funds, automatically identifies rebalance opportunities and tax loss harvesting. Basically nudging me like 3~5x per year. I'd pay a flat fee to do that.
I have a google sheet where I keep track of each fund I’ve bought and sold. From there I added a column with gain/loss for each tax lot with remaining shares, and a script that runs once a day to email me if there’s an opportunity for tax loss harvesting. It works pretty well.
I like the idea of rebalance opportunity notifications, but it’s harder to get retirement funds into a google sheet with all the automatic contributions that happen…
Back in 2015 I put some of my money into wealthfront, despite the market doing well at the time, my wealthfont fund which was heavily stock balanced did somewhat poorly. This was over a year's time so not short lived by any means. I pulled my money out and invested into stocks I chose and never looked back(typically get 10-15% returns a year). I would like to hear other people's perspectives about how their wealthfront funds did as my colleagues did the same as me and left wealthfront as well.
> This was over a year's time so not short lived by any means.
1 year of investment data is useless. An investor will be invested for their lifetime, we barely have decent data for 1 investor's invested lifetime(about 50 years). A decade comparison is arguably the bare minimum, you really want 20 years, as investments tend to be cyclical by a decade or so.
I can't speak for Wealthfront, but managed "funds" are typically balanced across high and low risk securities. Thus they will obviously lag behind even index funds like SPY/QQQ. Where managed funds tend to show benefits is in times of high volatility or downturns. Ask yourself how many downturns you've seen in the age of Wealthfront. Because I count 0. And 10-15% yearly returns aren't exactly impressive in the last 12 years. SPY stomped those numbers: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPY/performance/
I ran a very similar experiment. I don't recall the exact dates, but something like 2016 - 2018, and left Wealthfront as a result. I was under the threshold that incurs management fees, but Wealthfront was outperformed by S&P, at least over my time frame.
I never held anything with them during a market downturn, so I do wonder what that might look like. Potentially the lower returns would be justified by the existence of a hedge or holdings in lower-risk assets.
> Back in 2015 I put some of my money into wealthfront, despite the market doing well at the time, my wealthfont fund which was heavily stock balanced did somewhat poorly. This was over a year's time so not short lived by any means. I pulled my money out and invested into stocks I chose and never looked back(typically get 10-15% returns a year).
exact same sequence. I was surprised how poorly it underperformed.
I believe I've gotten lucky, but I moved all my money from Fidelity (making, 7% I think?, in a money market? I couldn't understand their UI so I don't recall) to Wealthfront. It currently shows and it's made 15% - 35% over 2 years.
really interesting takeaways from the Wealthfront landing page[0]:
* every example is shown as a smartphone app - not a single "desktop-oriented" screenshot to be found. I guess we are finished with the days where every service has an app. Now, every service is an app.
* In the first example, an investment portfolio is shown where roughly 10% of the holdings is in a group called "single stock bets." Yikes! Though maybe this a case of "know your audience"? maybe they are trying to convert the hordes of GME-pumpers to try something a bit less risky?
* lots of emphasis on "emerging markets", "socially responsible funds", crypto. I've always heard the best long-term advice is to simply throw your money into an ETF tracking the s&p500 or nasdaq, but clearly wealthfront is targeting those who want some emotional connection to their savings.
all in all, seems like a cool service, especially if it helps convince those to begin saving who would otherwise not be saving.
> * In the first example, an investment portfolio is shown where roughly 10% of the holdings is in a group called "single stock bets." Yikes! Though maybe this a case of "know your audience"? maybe they are trying to convert the hordes of GME-pumpers to try something a bit less risky?
Don't read too much into marketing materials.
It's likely that they surveyed a lot of potential customers and found a significant number were afraid that Wealthfront wouldn't allow them to choose individual stocks. So that factoid filtered its way over to the graphics design department, who were told to prominently display something about how you can still buy individual stocks.
I don't think having 10% of your equity investments in single stock bets is a yikes-worthy level of irresponsibility. It may not be the best way to perfectly optimize your long-term return, but for the vast majority of people it won't mean the difference between retiring comfortably and destitution—especially if actively managing a portion of your portfolio encourages a higher level of overall saving.
Re: the first example - Wealthfronts dashboard aggregates all your investments (if you give it access). The "single stock bet" is being pulled from the user's Robinhood account. The other two investments (with the purple icon) are through Wealthfront.
> * every example is shown as a smartphone app - not a single "desktop-oriented" screenshot to be found. I guess we are finished with the days where every service has an app. Now, every service is an app.
Their desktop experience isn't bad though! Other commenters have mentioned how garbage Wells Fargo/JP Morgans investment dashboards are and wealthfront thankfully takes user experience on both platforms seriously
Maybe they were trying to differentiate themselves from the offerings of a potential acquirer and prepping themselves for aquisition - particularly perhaps once they realized they weren't going to be able to beat the legacy banks.
Wealthfront used to have only a very limited portfolio options that used relatively best practices bogglehead-lite-ish, but I think ran into users constantly wanting customization, regardless of its "optimality".
Yes - this is the problem with all "we know best" style platforms.
Example: networking gear that supplies a dhcp server. You shouldn't have to put in the IP address range. It should just be yes or no, so no admin ever needs to know what dhcp even really does. It satisfies 80% of customers.
...but someone wants your own custom DHCP server, with custom IPs so that it can support your legacy printers, with reserved ranges of static IPs because the ghosted profile wants a printer at 172.16.12.2 etc. etc. etc. and that customer is willing to buy $1B of equipment, so you do add the customization. The slippery slope begins to acquire more customers.
When I think of what a FinTech darling Wealthfront was when it came out, all I can see this is as a colossal flop.
For what it's worth...
About a year ago I opened a robo-advisor account at SoFi and another at Wealthfront and pitted them against each other with high-risk/default settings and a weekly deposit.
The SoFi one has been outperforming the Wealthfront one all year long (by 1-2%; nothing life changing) which surprised me but it also made me feel that all the magic AI/ML under the covers that WF promoted didn't exist and no one was managing anything.
Stock returns over a single year are meaningless and not what they optimize for. Their "optimization" isn't perfect (MPT has some silly assumptions) but it's made for 30 years from now.
Has it continued to outperform Wealthfront during the past couple of weeks, where the markets have been trending more downward? Curious if SoFi has a higher-risk 'high-risk' setting than Wealthfront, in which case you might expect them to take more of a hit when the markets go down.
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I'll preface by saying that I have been talking to a lot of financial planners (at top-tier institutions). They basically set you up with a good set of ETFs, hedge funds, etc. and rebalance occasionally. Sometimes they do tax-loss harvesting. They also provide a few other nice little services. But at the end of the day, their fees are over 1% unless you have an ultra high net-worth.
In comparison, Wealthfront can automate huge strategies for a fraction of the cost (0.25%). For example:
- Direct Indexing (invest in an index by buying the stocks directly instead of a fund)
- Automatic investing, rebalancing, and tax-loss harvesting (including TLHing individual stocks within an index when paired with direct indexing)
- Coordinating trades between retirement and taxable accounts for optimal tax savings
- Smart beta (a custom weighted indexing algorithm)
Yes, a financial planner can do all of this (although most don't). But when they do, they just use automated software to do it. It would be impossible to implement these strategies manually. So why even go with a financial planner when Wealthfront does the same thing, but better/cheaper?
What caused me to leave?
- They aren't global portfolio aware. Bonds belong in tax advantaged accounts, then taxable. If you've maxed out your 401k/IRAs in Bonds that $ as an absolute percentage should be accounted for in your taxable portfolio construction.
- They don't let you opt out of asset classes. Aka I don't want additional REITs because I have RE exposure already.
- They overly hype tax loss harvesting. It's good to have, but a byproduct of portfolio management not the goal.
- They launched and pushed risky products as a way to increase their fees.
Once you understand what's going on under the hood this isn't complicated to manage yourself with a few ETFs/MFs.
(The direct indexing is awesome and would love to have that back)
That's true when say taxable bonds are yielding 8% and municipal bonds 6%. But when taxable bonds are yielding 2% (about the current 10-year U.S. Treasury yield), the tax hit from owning them in a taxable account is small, and maybe the growth assets such as stocks belong in a Roth IRA.
If you need to invest a small/decent amount of money into stocks, Robos work wonderfully. It's a mass production angle -- good quality service at lower cost to many people; the Ford Model T of investing. Early robot just had a couple of investment options, and now there are more options but the same concept of limited choice at scale (Mustangs, Minvans, Trucks in my example)
Once you have estate planning and complicated tax issues, human advisors provide a lot of guidance to people that is hyper specific to you and your location / niche, which Robos just don't cover. Wealthfront, for example, won't arbitrate a dispute between beneficiaries of a family trust.
I think lawyers are a good comparison here. If you need some standard cookie-cutter incorporation docs, there's a bunch of websites where you can get some core documents for free or a few hundred dollars. But if you're afraid of making the wrong choice, or if you're in a situation that goes beyond the common scenarios (like M&A), then you hire a lawyer to provide you personalized advice.
I'm interested to see if UBS can add value in those ways you mentioned, while still using sophisticated automated strategies for cost savings purposes.
Also note that Vanguard, JPM, Schwab, Fidelity etc. are getting in the robo-advising/direct indexing game.
I agree fully that estate planning/making a trust is something most people would benefit from a human advisor, but this is something you can target with an estate lawyer. I don't think this is something you would need advice on regular basis.
For taxes, I am guessing vast majority of people, even wealthy people, never need human advice nowadays. Anything that is just combination of W2+1099DIV+1099B+1099INT+1099NEC is handled well with robo tools. Tax loss harvesting is pretty simple (even without robo advising!) as long as you know wash sale rules and distinction between long/short term capital gains.
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phpBB with a custom "web1" frontend reminiscent of Craigslist. That's something I haven't seen in a long time.
My first impression was honestly to trust it more.
Thanks for sharing!
Can you share that one? PM me if preferred. I'm on a similar quest and so far I've found pretty much everything else you've found. My wife is a high income earner too and she's happy with the 1%/yr people that she likes, but I think we can get similar results for noticeably less.
Even 0.5% would be reasonable. As you know, from $1m to $2m that 1% fee goes from $10k to $20k and they're not doing anything more for that extra $10k/yr so the value proposition starts to break down for me. $10k in one year isn't a big deal, but over 20 years that's $200k, which might affect my retirement activities and definitely impacts how much is left for my kids (which they're going to really appreciate as life is so much more expensive for their generation).
Thats the 100$B question right? Because fear. Because unfamiliarity. Also because 1% seems small, but its really more like 14% (if the average return is 7%, you're giving up 1/7 of your return!)
What's funny is... whenever you call an FA (financial advisor) in a moment of panic... they answer always is "don't act emotionally and stick to the plan". Maybe a real "robo-advisor" should just be a chatbot that responds to any message it gets with "HODL".
>> Because unfamiliarity.
This one is going to be interesting to watch evolve and I see it becoming less of an edge for financial advisors. More and more, we are seeing retail investors gain familiarity (not saying knowledge... but at least familiarity) with financial markets through blogs, social media, etc. I think we are moving to a world of more self-directed investors than advised investors.
Some interesting articles to that effect:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/rich-millennials-to-financial-a...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fidelity-once-stodgy-and-adrift...
https://www.m1finance.com/blog/the-rise-of-financial-influen...
By Year 40:
* >$500K &
* ALMOST a quarter of the portfolio
When I was starting out, someone in my company's 401k forum mentioned this # (at that time the # was almost 40%, fees have gone down a lot since the early 2000's). And I am glad I paid attention.
I try and pass on this wisdom everytime I can. Now, you can too.
Here is a NerdWallet article on this topic: https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/investing/millennial-retirem...
AND
My attempt at recreating their math (TL;DR: It matches, almost): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QTa4XBIUgnLCt_lo6x0n...
edit: for formatting
1. people who don't want to think about it - they pay for everything to be taken care of properly
2. people who want to be wined and dined - they end up paying to be taken out to dinner a few times a year and hear about what the firm is doing to survive bear markets and how they're taking advantage of bull markets
3. people who think they're smarter than everyone and want to direct everything - these people are probably moving to more self serve options, but plenty still want to tell a human what trades to make
Also at a certain net worth, tax and estate planning is a huge part of the work.
So for wealthfront and friends, let's say a family member is closing on a property purchase. You said you'd put in $500K. Closing comes and you try to wire the money over. But wait, it doesn't work.
1) First you have to sell investments 2) Trades have to SETTLE (T+2 or more)! 3) Then and only then can you initiate an ACH transfer. 4) It can only go to your own account in some cases (T+1/T+2) 5) Then you have to go to you bank and get a wire out (retail banks often have tight cutoffs or end up delayed if going online while they "approve" this). 6) This all can be stressful on closing day (agents calling, escrow calling, bank calling, your relative calling). Now you are not days but a week late.
vs
Talking with someone. They enable margin account if you don't have one, you wire same day, done or you can give your guys name to everyone to help coordinate if needed if it will be a bit late.
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Curious why you would need to coordinate trades been taxable and retirement accounts?
Why would you want smart beta (that's active management)?
Their direct indexing portfolio also includes a whole bunch of their own in-house risk parity garbage products that carry high fees
The biggest question to me, you can trade ETFs for free now, why do you need wealthfront at all?
If you treat your retirement and taxable accounts as one big pot of money, you want to place assets to take the most advantage of the retirement account. For example, they mentioned bonds. Since yield on bonds is taxable at income tax levels every year, you want to prefer holding them in the tax exempt account.
Another reason is because of tax loss harvesting. To make that work, you have to avoid wash sales. The wash sale rule applies to you and every account you own, taxable, retirement, across brokers, etc. So to make TLH work, the broker needs to have a complete view.
>The biggest question to me, you can trade ETFs for free now, why do you need wealthfront at all?
For me, I'm on the west coast, so the market is open from 6:30 AM to 1 PM. I can't really monitor it nearly as closely as I'd really prefer. Looking at my betterment history, last year they automated 275 transactions for me. I can really only be bothered to look at the account once a month or so. Do the efficiency gains from a lower drift get me 0.25% additional value? Hard to say, but probably not. However, TLH absolutely has. I wouldn't trust myself to track that properly at all.
The speculation online is that it's because they lowered the minimum for their institution class funds, many large employer retirement funds sold their holdings of the non-institution funds, leaving everyone left with large capital gains and hence large tax bills unless you held it in a 401k/IRA.
I find Wealthfront to be overkill, but this is precisely the kind of thing they'd save you from.
Study after study has shown that investing in a broad market fund plus occasional (once a quarter) rebalancing is going to beat managed investing on average. So where do these products fit in really?
You could definitely just buy an index fund, but it's not exactly comparable.
Exmaple: I got divorced last year. Betterment took weeks of time and many phones calls until they were able to figure out a way to divide our assets evenly, without a large difference in cost basis. Their automatic algorithm for dividing accounts just didn't know how to handle it.
If UBS figures out how to offer a higher level of service on top of robo-advising, that could be a real win.
I for one prefer to make stock selections on my own, however Wealthfront, Betterment, and Personal Capital do not allow me to manage my own investments with any of the robo-advisory features. There is a huge opportunity in the space.
It would be great to talk to you about it - I’d love to hear your thoughts - any way we can connect?
If you buy and hold, it doesn't take much work and expenses for Vanguard ETFs are ~0.10%. Also, once you move to Wealthfront, it's hard to ever leave because of how they break things up (which, I'm sure, isn't unintentional).
If your allocation percentages remain very stable, you might not need to rebalance at all at the end of a quarter. If your allocations fall way out of whack, you might want to rebalance a portion of your portfolio earlier, and robos handle that timing for you.
I'd be surprised if the better timing doesn't provide 0.25% of value, not to mention it's just one less thing to have to think about.
"The Robo Report" [1] has detailed quarterly robo reports on performance, features, comparisons etc
[1] https://www.backendbenchmarking.com/
Meanwhile the leading robo-advisor in Canada, WealthSimple recently raised funds at a $5 billion CAD valuation, on a $7.7 billion USD AUM [1].
I have felt for a while like the robo-advisory market is in roadrunner mode - has run past the edge of the cliff but hasn't quite yet fallen. Maybe this is the first sign that the party's ending.
[0] https://www.roboadvisorpros.com/robo-advisors-with-most-aum-...
[1] https://financialpost.com/investing/wealthsimple-valuation-s...
UBS has a $2.6tr+ wealth management division - they need the sexy fintech frontend.
Log into the investment platform and you're back in 1993. They literally have no drip-investment style offering. They want to charge you 100bps to "manage" your money, or you get a broken/buggy online broker with barely any functionality.
Why the heck isnt JPMChase buying one of these platforms?!?
Broadly speaking, the retail market can be segmented on two axes: net worth and involvement.
Low net worth, high involvement are day traders: they are profitable through fees, PFOF, et cetera. High net worth, high involvement doesn’t tend to exist long enough to specialise in; they’re, professionals, have better things to do or lose their money.
Low net worth, low involvement is patient capital. Not super profitable per se. But the most likely to develop into the last category: high net worth, low involvement; the money maker.
Robo-advisers targeted the third category. They got more of the first. Those not only bolted to crypto and Robinhood. They also incurred higher costs to the firm while promising less development potential to the fourth category. The actual third category participants, to a large degree, don’t need much more than was available in 1993, or at least are savvy enough not to find themselves paying for it.
I'd disagree with this. In 1993, you couldnt do fractional shares, or auto-invest, or pie-based investments. In 1993, you couldnt purcahse $500/wk of BRKB/AMZN/TSLA because there was no product like that short of paying a mutual fund 150bps. You couldnt tax-loss harvest (like with WealthFront)
You can get that now with M1, FolioFN (GS), ShareBuilder (RIP). It is low investment and high-stickiness.
You're noting net work and involvement and profit, but I think stickiness is another factor to focus on.
My take (as a previous employee at Betterment): Wealthfront/Betterment/et al came out to much fanfare and the promise of disrupting the traditional wealth management industry.
At first, it seemed like they were right. AUM growth was looking like a hockey stick...this caused some panic at the big firms' who hurried to launch their own offerings (this is like 2015-ish) which were minimal at best, and still mostly just "marketing products" - a thin roboadvisor veneer designed to drive users into their traditional businesses.
Over the next 2-5 years and up to now, it is becoming/has become obvious that roboadvisors are not, in fact, going to disrupt the industry and it's rather a race to the bottom in pricing with razor thin (or non-existent) margins...so the actual robos have largely stagnated and the big firms stopped investing into their own solutions.
Yet in banking, there arent great stacks where you can keep your relationship across the board. For JPMC, an acquisition of a Betterment or WealthFront (or others) would be a drop in the bucket.
Isn't that the point of automation? Doesn't the saying go, "your margin is my opportunity"?
I'm aware that these investments often go south. I've seen HSBC's foray into "Fintech" and it was rough.
Honestly it’s probably a good thing. Chase is pretty awful at basic retail banking. Really only makes sense if you live in Manhattan or something where there are like 3 mega banks in every corner.
Yes, i'm in the NY area, so true on branch location issue. But how often do you have to visit a branch if you have good systems? The branch is usually for when systems fail.
Not the best lending bank, and def not the best investment platform. I'm not sure why they cant be all three (organic or m&a) given the high synergy.
I could a lot of acquisitions in the coming months as capital moves out of growth at all costs fintech space and startups need a lifeline.
GS purchased FolioFN, which was a lesser player, but still a decent platform. JPM is going to have to gulp down M1 Finance and pay for being so slow to the acquisition game <-- My prediction!
Online brokerages selling order flow are very profitable, so even the "buy" decision seems like a no-brainer given the obvious monetization route. DRIP-style investment is even stickier -- you set it and forget it. Make it part of the Premier/Sapphire tiers and people dont want to move at all.
[0] https://media.chase.com/news/jpmorgan-chase-enters-agreement...
Wealthfront was an attempt to automate that while adding some bells and whistles on top; tax loss harvesting, smart beta, etc.
Curious to see how they succeed as part of UBS. I thought Marcus/Goldman was going to buy them personally, so a bit surprised UBS is getting in on this game.
What is strange to me about robo advisors is that they are still charging a management fee instead of a flat fee. The algorithms are really basic and don’t have any real time changes so it seems weird to charge 25-50 basis points for what’s basically just an interview and time based rebalancing with some formulas that aren’t really better than existing ETFs.
I’ve been expecting this to just be a feature for vanguard and fidelity since the “advise” could just be client side automation rules that nobody wants to build.
I actually wouldn't mind a platform that uses my brokerage as a backend and lets me do % allocations on 3~4 funds, automatically identifies rebalance opportunities and tax loss harvesting. Basically nudging me like 3~5x per year. I'd pay a flat fee to do that.
I like the idea of rebalance opportunity notifications, but it’s harder to get retirement funds into a google sheet with all the automatic contributions that happen…
1 year of investment data is useless. An investor will be invested for their lifetime, we barely have decent data for 1 investor's invested lifetime(about 50 years). A decade comparison is arguably the bare minimum, you really want 20 years, as investments tend to be cyclical by a decade or so.
You must be one of:
1. lucky 2. a genius 3. a crook 4. haven't invested on a long enough timeframe.
Everybody invested in broad market index funds has been making those returns the last few years.
I never held anything with them during a market downturn, so I do wonder what that might look like. Potentially the lower returns would be justified by the existence of a hedge or holdings in lower-risk assets.
exact same sequence. I was surprised how poorly it underperformed.
* every example is shown as a smartphone app - not a single "desktop-oriented" screenshot to be found. I guess we are finished with the days where every service has an app. Now, every service is an app.
* In the first example, an investment portfolio is shown where roughly 10% of the holdings is in a group called "single stock bets." Yikes! Though maybe this a case of "know your audience"? maybe they are trying to convert the hordes of GME-pumpers to try something a bit less risky?
* lots of emphasis on "emerging markets", "socially responsible funds", crypto. I've always heard the best long-term advice is to simply throw your money into an ETF tracking the s&p500 or nasdaq, but clearly wealthfront is targeting those who want some emotional connection to their savings.
all in all, seems like a cool service, especially if it helps convince those to begin saving who would otherwise not be saving.
[0] https://www.wealthfront.com/
That's 10% of the entire portfolio spread out over (presumably) multiple individual stocks, which seems reasonable to me... is it not?
Don't read too much into marketing materials.
It's likely that they surveyed a lot of potential customers and found a significant number were afraid that Wealthfront wouldn't allow them to choose individual stocks. So that factoid filtered its way over to the graphics design department, who were told to prominently display something about how you can still buy individual stocks.
They love these stocks because they usually have a big short interest. The broker can lend them out and keep the profits for themself.
Only IKBR does some sharing of securities lending profits.
Their desktop experience isn't bad though! Other commenters have mentioned how garbage Wells Fargo/JP Morgans investment dashboards are and wealthfront thankfully takes user experience on both platforms seriously
Example: networking gear that supplies a dhcp server. You shouldn't have to put in the IP address range. It should just be yes or no, so no admin ever needs to know what dhcp even really does. It satisfies 80% of customers.
...but someone wants your own custom DHCP server, with custom IPs so that it can support your legacy printers, with reserved ranges of static IPs because the ghosted profile wants a printer at 172.16.12.2 etc. etc. etc. and that customer is willing to buy $1B of equipment, so you do add the customization. The slippery slope begins to acquire more customers.
For what it's worth...
About a year ago I opened a robo-advisor account at SoFi and another at Wealthfront and pitted them against each other with high-risk/default settings and a weekly deposit.
The SoFi one has been outperforming the Wealthfront one all year long (by 1-2%; nothing life changing) which surprised me but it also made me feel that all the magic AI/ML under the covers that WF promoted didn't exist and no one was managing anything.
@ 25bps that would be ~$70M revenue but there is some discounting so it is probably closer to $60M
2021 was a good year for the market, a great time to be acquired.
They raised in 2014 @ $750M then 2017 @$500M