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

321–330 of 330 posts

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#321

Post by grog454 »

xur17 wrote: post #181
NavinF wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While true, note that the effects of tax loss harvesting are really only significant for a few years after acquiring the asset (since stocks tend to go up over time), but you will pay the Wealthfront fee for the rest of your life (especially since they do direct indexing, which makes switching away complicated). And fwiw, tax loss harvesting sounds complicated, but it really isn't that hard to do. If I notice stocks…

> If I notice stocks have gone down a lot recently, I'll hop into Vanguard, and swap anything that is underwater with another similar, but not identical fund.

How much effort do you have to put in to avoiding wash sales?

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#322

Post by dnadler »

borski wrote: post #262
dnadler wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very interesting to me. I've been working on a retirement calculator in my free time as a hobby project for a while [1], but it never really occurred to me that there is real value in allowing people to do the 'what-if' analysis more easily. It seems obvious now... Could you see yourself using something like this if there was an easy way to compare different scenarios? [1] https://lunchmodel.com/lmrc/scenario

You'd make a lot of money with this, I think. A lot of people don't have financial advisors and also don't have any method (or knowledge) of how to model various scenarios; if you built this out I bet you'd have a nice little passive income tool. Would it make billions of dollars? Probably not. I'd use it and pay for it though, especially if it factored in historic market data, automatically figured out housing incre…

Thanks for the encouragement, glad that you think it would be useful. I’ll keep plugging away at it!

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#323

Post by grog454 »

throwawaysea wrote: post #314
Chamix wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of getting good at 1 big tech job making 300k in 20-30 hours a week you get good at 2-3 and make 800k+ in 60 hours a week. Though I think the actual best way to optimize labor-to-income is F500 Cloud SRE via B2B contract, but its hard to have to balls to pivot to that after spending so long perfecting SWE interview skills.

Wait so you literally work at multiple companies? How do you manage meetings and deadlines and things like that? Surely that creates conflicts between them.

Not sure how well this ever works in practice, but I just realized you could work remotely for drastically different time zones if your employers were spread across multiple countries.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#324

Post by NavinF »

grog454 wrote: post #321
xur17 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While true, note that the effects of tax loss harvesting are really only significant for a few years after acquiring the asset (since stocks tend to go up over time), but you will pay the Wealthfront fee for the rest of your life (especially since they do direct indexing, which makes switching away complicated). And fwiw, tax loss harvesting sounds complicated, but it really isn't that hard to do. If I notice stocks…

> If I notice stocks have gone down a lot recently, I'll hop into Vanguard, and swap anything that is underwater with another similar, but not identical fund. How much effort do you have to put in to avoiding wash sales?

It’s pretty forgiving. For example, an S&P500 ETF and a “Total Stock Market ETF” are considered different even though they are 99% correlated. There are lots of indexes from different companies that track the same thing and I wouldn’t be surprised if 2 ETFs that track 2 different “Total Stock Market” indexes also work (99.9% correlation?)

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#325

Post by erik_seaberg »

mrep wrote: post #305
erik_seaberg wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $100k AUM they start “direct indexing,” buying shares as well as ETFs. I only started in 2020 but so far they’ve harvested 3.6x their own fees. I would not have spent time doing that, so it’s gravy.

Except you are still going to pay those taxes when you do sell, you are just delaying the taxable event so I wouldn't consider that money actually saved. What is the situation where that is actually useful? Take me for example, I invested for 5 years in VTI and then sold it for a downpayment. What would their TLH do for me in that situation because I didn't need to offset cap gains in those middle years and the end y…

True, if you cash out that soon you only get use of the tax money for a little while. I like TLH for the same reason I like a traditional 401(k). Right now I’m getting a Bay Area tech salary and RSUs, and I want to defer some taxes until I’m in a lower bracket.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#326

Post by prepend »

mindslight wrote: post #125
prepend wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using a client based tool (Moneydance) for 10+ years and some banks did support special accounts that had read only access to ofx APIs. It was kind of nice as I didn’t have to worry about my passwords as much. It’s gotten worse over the years as banks have stopped support for open APIs. I guess because of plaid-type integrators that make custom interfaces. I’ll likely quit my bank (usaa) as they got rid of…

It feels like there should be some libre tool that automates downloading OFX through the web interfaces and keeps up with the breakage, at least for popular banks. Integrate with procmail and the like to deal with snake oil 2FA, etc.

I’ve tried gnucash a few times but it was just too much work for not enough rewards. I’ve contemplated just making my own scrape to database script because all I really want is a ledger I can query.

Moneydance has been decent enough and I think I’ve paid $100-150 in 10+ years for an initial version and then an upgraded one.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#327

Post by mindslight »

prepend wrote: post #326
mindslight wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like there should be some libre tool that automates downloading OFX through the web interfaces and keeps up with the breakage, at least for popular banks. Integrate with procmail and the like to deal with snake oil 2FA, etc.

I’ve tried gnucash a few times but it was just too much work for not enough rewards. I’ve contemplated just making my own scrape to database script because all I really want is a ledger I can query. Moneydance has been decent enough and I think I’ve paid $100-150 in 10+ years for an initial version and then an upgraded one.

The download functionality of Moneydance and GNUCash is via "OFX Direct Connect", which is an older non-HTTPS protocol to download OFX data from a bank. But as web culture took over with things like Plaid, banks have become more wary about serving up a bespoke protocol that (I believe) authenticates in plain text, or at the very least doesn't support snake oil 2FA and the like. For example, Capital One 360 used to serve it up, but they turned it off in the past several years.

Meanwhile, all banks seem to have the functionality to download .ofx/.qfx files through their web interface. I believe this is what Plaid et al retrieve. Of course using Plaid is horrible because not only are you giving out your credentials, but you're also giving away your private financial data to a surveillance company. But you can personally download the OFX files from the web interface for use with Moneydance (etc), and given the way OFX works you don't even need to be careful about overlapping date ranges (eg download the last year of transactions every month).

Of course that becomes a bit tedious and doesn't give Moneydance (or whatever) access to your recent transactions (it would be very convenient to `tail /var/log/bank` rather than having to login manually). So I'm wondering if anyone has written a libre package that aims to do the web scraping approach for various popular banks that don't support Direct Connect.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#328

Post by prepend »

mindslight wrote: post #327
prepend wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve tried gnucash a few times but it was just too much work for not enough rewards. I’ve contemplated just making my own scrape to database script because all I really want is a ledger I can query. Moneydance has been decent enough and I think I’ve paid $100-150 in 10+ years for an initial version and then an upgraded one.

The download functionality of Moneydance and GNUCash is via "OFX Direct Connect", which is an older non-HTTPS protocol to download OFX data from a bank. But as web culture took over with things like Plaid, banks have become more wary about serving up a bespoke protocol that (I believe) authenticates in plain text, or at the very least doesn't support snake oil 2FA and the like. For example, Capital One 360 used to se…

OFX supports SSL/TLS as the protocol. Doesn’t directly support 2fa, but I don’t care as it’s read only downloads of data.

I still manually download csv or qif files, but that’s much less convenient than automatic imports. I like the idea of an open standard and wish banks would throw them away instead of improving them. OFX was issued in the 90s so the fact it runs at all is at least something.

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#329

Post by adammenges »

zylepe wrote: post #307
mbesto wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

Thought about integrating it with Alpacha?

Re: UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B

#330

Post by GorsoSurthis »

matteotom wrote: post #153
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 mar…

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN