A lot of you likely invest in a boglehead style. 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.
Did anyone get any real beta out of it for a sustainable period?
UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B
71–80 of 330 posts
Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B
#72Anyone know of any other product offer that will take excess after direct deposit and invest it for you? I've called Fidelity and Betterment and both do not offer an automated way like wealthfront does. Really sad to see wealthfront being the only player in that space. Edit: by automated I mean something like "everything over $10k after bills, invest". It takes a couple of clicks per month manually, but it's been pre…
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but nearly every bank I've ever used offers this feature. I currently have auto-transfers and auto-investments set up in Fidelity. If you receive a paycheck, you can easily set up Fidelity so that it automatically transfers $xxxx dollars per month to whatever account you like. You can also set up each account to automatically purchase $xxxx dollars worth of whatever equity you want.
Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tax savings I get from them is much more than the annual fee. I converted the portfolio to 100% US stocks btw. Sure I can harvest losses myself but that introduces emotion and watching the market carefully.
Don’t understand this. The tax savings only come from realized loses. In the long run SPY will likely best that including your “savings”.
Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B
#74Sorry for the possible off-topic, but can anyone explain to me how the robo-advising is different/better/worse than constant passive investing into popular ETFs, e.g. $SPY, $BND, $VOO, etc.?
Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B
#75really 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 may…
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".
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.
Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B
#76really 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 may…
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
Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B
#77Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B
#78How much better has wealth front done vs SPY, fee adjusted? Imho all robo advisers are a waste of money. If they were actually effective they’d use their own services themselves as opposed to sell them to retail. The latest crop of businesses really are marketing value adds. See: https://longbets.org/362/ Other people have done similar bets and they all lose on a risk adjusted, fee adjusted basis.
The tax savings I get from them is much more than the annual fee. I converted the portfolio to 100% US stocks btw. Sure I can harvest losses myself but that introduces emotion and watching the market carefully.
Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B
#79Sorry for the possible off-topic, but can anyone explain to me how the robo-advising is different/better/worse than constant passive investing into popular ETFs, e.g. $SPY, $BND, $VOO, etc.?
45% VTI
20% VEA
19% VWO
14% VIG
2% VETB
They do also offer some services such as “tax loss harvesting” that you can’t really do on your own, but I don’t really know if it’s worth their fee.Really, I think one of the best investing strategies is to buy and hold a variety of Vanguard funds and stop thinking about it.
Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B
#80Interesting, the figure does seem quite low to me. Boglehead passive investing has worked really well for the past dozen years. I expect the next 10-15 to be much more challenging given the extremely high starting valuations and end of the low interest rate and QE tailwind. I've been building algotrading models to help tackle the challenge of when to hedge at https://grizzlybulls.com
How does your platinum plan work?