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UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

reuters.com

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Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#241

Post by zie »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #218
zie wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 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 b…

> 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…

I agree, 1% is pretty high, but not ridiculous like EJ's 2% fee.

Many Robo advisors throw an RIA in for free, and they are in the 0.3% ER range. It's hard to get cheaper than that.

The only subscription based one I'm aware of right now is: https://planvisionmn.com/ They give you Fidelity's eMoney platform and you manage that part of it. They just help you with the planning part.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#242

Post by ppg677 »

I had a lot of money in Wealthfront. It was not a good experience.

First they auto-opted me into some actively managed hedge fund thingy they cooked up. As part of this auto-optin, they caused a non-trivial taxable event. And the fees increased.

When I decided to bail and move my assets elsewhere, I was then left with 500 individual stock equity positions to deal with. What a mess. Took me a long time to sort out that mess and to get my assets into a more manageable situation for an individual. Of course to consolidate I had to take the tax event once they converted to long-term capital gains. I did a lot of this during spring of 2020 which was not a good time to be mucking with stock positions. I lost a fair amount of money.

Finally the tax-loss harvesting is not aware of outside accounts and technically you might be violating tax rules. My accountant ultimately told me over the phone that current reporting rules essentially make this unenforceable though...but he refused to put that in an email.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#243

Post by astrange »

endisneigh wrote: post #237
astrange wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does Vanguard sell you ETFs instead of keeping them for themselves?

Vanguard is not famous for actively managed funds.

Neither are robos. Rebalancing according to some rules isn't active management.

Vanguard has more active management products, actually. Besides their Windsor fund, S&P 500 is an actively managed index.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#244

Post by pyrrhotech »

blobbers wrote: post #162
pyrrhotech wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website is built with NextJs. The models are all built with NodeJs--custom backtester framework, and the execution framework and data fetchers are also in Node and leverage a few open source libraries and currently only works with Interactive Brokers. We just launched mid December, and currently have 16 paying subscribers and 178 free members. MRR about $2500. The Platinum plan can be either implemented via API, emai…

This is a pretty regulated market. How did you set up the managed account?

Managed accounts must first be set up on Interactive Brokers by the client, with a margin account + futures trading permission. Then a second user must be added with Limited Trading Authorization: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/trading-authorization.a.... Interactive Brokers has some standard forms to establish the contract. Once all that's set up, I run a parallel instance of my bot with your account in the cloud. Please send me a "Contact Us" or an email if you are interested and want to know more details.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#245

Post by ppg677 »

sharx wrote: post #202
maxclark wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

Yes that was my experience. And it sucked. I had 500 individual stocks to deal with.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#246

Post by parthdesai »

dmix wrote: post #124
myth_drannon wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's not robo-advisor anymore. It's also crypto, stock trading (copying Robinhood) and tax preparation.

And WealthSimple has a Venmo like Cash app (called Cash). They do way more than stocks.

do people even use Cash though? all my buddies just use interac

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#247

Post by ppg677 »

mushufasa wrote: post #139
lzrs wrote: post #131

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 d…

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…

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.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#248

Post by zie »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #230
bonestamp2 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It can be hard convincing people that 1% is a big number. I assume that you are on average going to see 6-7% return after inflation. The 1% represents 15% of the return. So you give the tax collector 25% and the money manager another 15%. You can defer the taxes but the manager gets theirs once a quarter. When you are in the $1m+ AUM, it is pretty easy to explain. You are going to be paying for your kids to go to col…

After you get over 1M+ AUM, your advisor should seriously think long and hard about lowering their fees, many will go down almost in half(.5%ER). Still high, but if you really desire hands-off do everything for me, it's reasonable.

Once you get to 30M+ invested NW, you can seriously think about a multi-family office and > 100M+ a family office just for you starts making sense.

Most people will have a hard time getting over 1M before retirement, so I left the other options off my original post.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#249

Post by zie »

echelon wrote: post #213
zie wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 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 b…

> * Bogleheads.org will do it for free as long as you follow their template. 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!

you are welcome! Come by, it's a pretty nice community and many there have been retired for a while, so they can help you see the follies before you make them, if one is smart enough to listen.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#250

Post by thesausageking »

lzrs wrote: post #131

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 d…

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).

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