Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 330 posts

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#101

Post by skeeter2020 »

subsubzero wrote: post #89

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 wealthfro…

>> I pulled my money out and invested into stocks I chose and never looked back(typically get 10-15% returns a year)

You must be one of:

1. lucky 2. a genius 3. a crook 4. haven't invested on a long enough timeframe.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#102

Post by dartdartdart »

TuringNYC wrote: post #57
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ne…

>> 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.…

Are you saying m1 also offers set and forget investments? Seems like folioFn and sharebuilder arent operating anymore

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#103

Post by rohitnair »

pepemon wrote: post #56

Sorry 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.?

Some features that Betterment offers for example

* automatic rebalancing

* tax loss harvesting

* tax co-ordinated investing - looks at both your taxable and tax exempt/deffered accounts and directs funds appropriately (for example, puts more tax inefficient assets in your tax exempt accounts)

You can of course do this on your own as well, so it's up to you to decide whether the additional fee is worth it or not. Also, not all robo advisors offer the same features - but most offer automatic rebalancing at a minimum.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#104

Post by hedora »

endisneigh wrote: post #11
lotsofpulp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These investing middlemen have all been obviated by automation. No one is beating the 0.03% to 0.15% expense ratios for index ETFs/Target Date Retirement Funds from Vanguard/Schwab/Fidelity.

Agreed completely. I don’t know how anyone can justify 10 times the fees using wealthfront for non trivial amounts of money. I personally have many friends who are very happy with betterment and wealthfront which is good. When I ask them about their returns in the past couple years they say that the stocks have done amazingly. When I tell them SPY would’ve given them higher returns and lower fees they’re skeptical, a…

One reason they've underperformed a bit is because they have a lower risk profile than SPY.

When the market crashes, I expect their autorebalancer to make a killing.

It's been hard to compete with "stick all your money into the biggest US companies" for the last few years, but those years weren't typical.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#105

Post by TuringNYC »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #91
TuringNYC wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.…

> 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) Fractional shares are a day-trading tool. Apart from that, yes, you're citing real innovations. (Others include a dramatic reduction in trading cos…

>> Fractional shares are a day-trading tool.

Absolutely not, polar opposite. If i'm a buy-and-hold investor who wants to set-it-and-forget it invest auto every week, Fractional share purchase are the only real way to consistently purchase. How would you buy AMZN every pay period if a single share is more than your entire investment amount.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#106

Post by ShakataGaNai »

subsubzero wrote: post #89

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 wealthfro…

I started in 2016, other than 2018 (down 8%) I've been up ~10-25% each year. It's worked well and I've been happy with it.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#107

Post by TuringNYC »

JackFr wrote: post #95
TuringNYC wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.…

In 1993 the NYSE still quoted prices in 1/8's, and if you wanted to get a quote you either had to own a Quotron or call your broker.

And you'd ask your broker for a chart, and they would print a dot matrix printer version of the chart and snail mail it to you in 1993!

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#108

Post by anonu »

propter_hoc wrote: post #15

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 tha…

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.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#109

Post by 310260 »

cheonic8492 wrote: post #13
endisneigh wrote: post #6

How 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.

> Imho all robo advisers are a waste of money. Robo and human financial advisors provide emotional hand-holding and comfort. Same reason why you trust a doctor, despite doctors underperforming (intelligent) self-directed health and nutrition research.

> self-directed health and nutrition research

That's a bold statement considering the anti-vaccine climate today. The value in doctors isn't necessarily what they've learned but instead what trends they've seen personally and local to your area.

I do agree human financial advisors are mainly a tool for comfort. I've got one and most of our conversations instigated by him are relationship-building and not necessarily aggessive-fund-strategy type talk.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#110

Post by TuringNYC »

dartdartdart wrote: post #102
TuringNYC wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.…

Are you saying m1 also offers set and forget investments? Seems like folioFn and sharebuilder arent operating anymore

Yes, M1 offers what ShareBuilder used to offer, except with community pies, etc. https://www.m1finance.com/how-it-works/invest/ You set the portfolio, set the auto-amount, and forget about it.

FolioFN got purchased by GS.

ShareBuilder was purchased by CapitalOne and flushed down the toilet immediately.

Post reply on HN