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

151–160 of 330 posts

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#151

Post by wilg »

bwbmr wrote: post #46
dartdartdart wrote: post #12

Anyone 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…

Betterment had that until a month ago: "Two-Way Cash Sweep", though that swept into their cash reserve account, not the investment accounts. They said that less than 1% of users had it enabled, and so discontinued it.

This is what is making me want to switch to Wealthfront or something else.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#152

Post by mcgin »

TuringNYC wrote: post #5

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"…

JP Morgan purchased Nutmeg last year [0]

[0] https://media.chase.com/news/jpmorgan-chase-enters-agreement...

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#153

Post by matteotom »

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…

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.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#154

Post by boring_twenties »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #51
dymk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is. Logging into those accounts is a pain in the ass, and requires active effort to remember doing. Automating things like bill-pay, deposits, and other "set it and forget it" tech is the best thing since sliced bread.

>Logging into those accounts is a pain in the ass Just to be clear, we are talking about clicking on a bookmark, letting the password manager fill in the login info, and the clicking login or pressing enter? >requires active effort to remember doing Checking up on one's assets is something that should be on a periodic to do list. We even have devices that can be scheduled to alert us when it is time.

> Just to be clear, we are talking about clicking on a bookmark, letting the password manager fill in the login info, and the clicking login or pressing enter?

Close, you forgot the part where you need to locate your 2FA device, possibly connect it to a charger and wait for it to boot if needed, and then of course actually get the 2FA code and type it into the website.

edit: Oh, and I forgot the part where if you need to boot the device, you probably have to type in the password.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#155

Post by kmonsen »

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…

But why go with wealthfront when you can buy a target date fund from vanguard? It gets you most of what you really need?

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#156

Post by iamspoilt »

blobbers wrote: post #67
jmacd wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Speaking of TFSA/RRSPs etc. is there a canadian version of bogleheads we should know about?

We have quite a bit in line with this:

https://www.canadianportfoliomanagerblog.com/blog/

https://community.rationalreminder.ca/

https://www.finiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

https://www.financialwisdomforum.org/forum/index.php

https://canadiancouchpotato.com/

Also, we have Ben Felix's podcasts - Rational Reminder

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#157

Post by lazide »

paxys wrote: post #143
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…

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…

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).

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#158

Post by matteotom »

dartdartdart wrote: post #12

Anyone 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…

If you pay for M1 pro ($125/year) you can set a "smart rule" to automatically transfer above $x from your spend (checking) account to an investment account, and automatically invest it.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#159

Post by wayne »

kmonsen wrote: post #155
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…

But why go with wealthfront when you can buy a target date fund from vanguard? It gets you most of what you really need?

Even a few months ago, I was recommending the same to friends. But late in 2021, Vanguard unexpectedly hit all their Target Date funds with large tax bills: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=366566

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.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#160

Post by NavinF »

kmonsen wrote: post #155
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…

But why go with wealthfront when you can buy a target date fund from vanguard? It gets you most of what you really need?

If you just buy and hold a target date fund, you miss out on loss harvesting. A free loan on taxes owed can be turned into free money.
Post reply on HN