Wealthfront was an attempt to automate that while adding some bells and whistles on top; tax loss harvesting, smart beta, etc.
Curious to see how they succeed as part of UBS. I thought Marcus/Goldman was going to buy them personally, so a bit surprised UBS is getting in on this game.
What is strange to me about robo advisors is that they are still charging a management fee instead of a flat fee. The algorithms are really basic and don’t have any real time changes so it seems weird to charge 25-50 basis points for what’s basically just an interview and time based rebalancing with some formulas that aren’t really better than existing ETFs.
I’ve been expecting this to just be a feature for vanguard and fidelity since the “advise” could just be client side automation rules that nobody wants to build.
Plus, people invest for reasons other than dated retirement targets.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/vanguard-target-retirement-tax-...
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 like the idea of rebalance opportunity notifications, but it’s harder to get retirement funds into a google sheet with all the automatic contributions that happen…