Anybody use these? How has it performed for you? I've been using betterment with 100% stock allocation and have gotten 5.5% in the last year. Anybody just straight up buy s&p 500?
5.5% year is sad. S&P or vanguard as mentioned earlier work. Alternatively/ additionally, you can take an active approach yourself and give investing a try.
If you try and give investing a try, I would definitely recommend using a simulator before investing a lot of money / using robinhood app so you can use a small amount and not pay trading fees.
Over the long term you're likely to gain more money by passive investing than by active investing on your own. This even holds true for some professionals, like mutual funds, who underperform the market quite often.
My Betterment returns with 90/10 split is ~2.4%... Sad :(
How long have you invested with them?
Sorry it's 3.4%.. And I'm not talking about the time weighted returns. Been with them since Jan 2014
Tried all 3 include betterment, wealthfront, and intelligent portfolios with max risk. betterment and intelligence portfolios have the best interfere and returns but they are still only a few percent. wealth font is negative. The tax loss harvesting is cool but doesn't add a whole lot. Great for people who want to do passive or automatic investing but so far over the past few years much better return with vti and unbelievably better with single stocks (but much higher risk obviously)
3.6% is 6 months. That's not bad.
Don't make decisions based on 1 year of data. Decide what you want your long term allocation to be and then pick the tool.
Use Vanguard to get same results minus high costs.
High costs? 0.15% for Betterment is high? And that includes everything like rebalancing, tax loss harvesting, fractional shares so you're always fully invested, plus all the convenience for easy deposits and withdrawals that come tax optimized?
Yes, 0.15% >>0.00%
I got 9.98% over the past year with Acorns. But only had very little money in it.
I'm at -10% over an year through Acorns. Not much control available (yes it's a robo investor, I agree). I wouldn't recommend it to anyone
I love Betterment. I've used it for the past year and am at 9.5% growth with 100% stock allocation for the year. Granted I got in at the end of the market slump this year, and with international markets improving, my number is high. Sure they're basically charging 0.15% (if you have $10-100k invested) premium to rebalance your portfolio, switch investments based on taxes and fees, and perform tax optimizations. Last year they saved me $150 using tax loss harvesting, which was cool. My sense is that if you have less than $25,000 to play with in Betterment, go for it. But anything more and it's probably time you learn to manage your own portfolio. It's easy enough to play with Betterment and see which funds the portfolio is based on. They're very transparent. They tell you which funds they consider for each asset class, which find they prefer, and why. The "less preferred" finds are traded when the tax situation is beneficial I believe. So basically after a bit of playing with Betterment it becomes simple to open a Vanguard account or use Robinhood to build a very similar portfolio and cut your fees more than half.
For those interested, here are the ETFs that Betterment relies on last I checked for stocks, in order of preferred to least preferred funds: US Total Stock Market (17.5%): VTI, SCHB, ITOT US Large Cap Value (17.5%): VTV, IV, SCHV US Mid-Cap Value (6%): VOE, IWS, IJJ US Small-Cap Value (5%): VBR, IWN, IJS Developed Markets (41%): VEA, SCHF, IEFA Emerging Markets (13%): VWO, IEMG, EEM Pretty much for each asset class the only fund I have is the first one, the cheaper Vanguard. You'd likely be fine sticking to that.
That's great , thanks for sharing. How would you recommend investing across these for say 25k long term? Just split them up evenly ?
Use the percentages on each asset category. So Emerging Markets is 13% of total portfolio, so invest that 25k into VWO (the most preferred index, and cheapest from a fees perspective). I believe Betterment uses the backup funds IEMG and EEM for tax optimization strategies, so often it will rebalance your portfolio and buy small amounts of those funds when it would decrease you year end taxes.
A waste in my opinion. They basically just trade in and out of certain vanguard funds. You're better off just buying on your own and not paying their silly premium.