You'll get a pretty nice report of your portfolio and (market) returns. Spiral bound and everything.
If you want an accountant for international issues, I question the wisdom of doing that unless life/business naturally throws them your way, but $500k buys an awful lot of hours from someone who knows the transaction and localities involved, which your investment advisor does not. (Will every investment advisor in the Chicago phone book happily take a $50 million client who wants to spend $5 million on a modestly nice house in Tokyo? Yes. Do any add value to that transaction? Well, maybe one does. Could you find much better advice? Oh heck yes.)
Wealthy individuals have access to investment strategies that resemble far more the philosophy of large pension funds than that of robo-advisors. (You can also check out Tiger 21, a sort of investment club for Wealthy people, they post their recommended asset allocations on a regular basis.) They also tend to be more focused on capital preservation and minimizing volatility than strictly beating the market. Their portfolios are typically highly diversified outside of publicly traded assets to accomplish that.
Finally, the firms that work with them offer significantly more for their money. Detailed estate planning and legacy planning, tax planning, corporate tax planning, and advice on charitable foundations and more.
While I do agree with some of what you are saying about how "advice" is priced, particularly when it comes to the mass market, there is definitely a point in the wealth of an individual where there couldn't be more points of difference between what people get in terms of financial advice.
Source: I've worked at a wealth management firm that dealt with HNWI for quite some time.
Edit: Just to add a bit on the different this makes for HNWIs
At the firm I worked at their client's biggest losses throughout 2008 were no more than 6-7% (after fees were considered), while at the same time being invested in assets that yielded nearly that much in cash flow through dividends, interest, etc. that same year. Since a portion of the portfolio was also invested in public equities (around 30%) and because these client's could easily stomach the markets considering their personal performance they were able to ride it back up without fleeing to cash like so many others did.
One of the problem smaller investors face is that in major market crisis situations almost all publicly traded assets take a hit as the mass market migrates to cash. If you follow the herd (as most obviously do or they wouldn't be the herd) you regularly miss out on the benefits of these market movements.
I know these are naive questions, but here goes: do those pension funds differ greatly from large university endowments? How do those differ from what one can achieve using a combination of cheap index funds? Ramit Sethi famously recommended an allocation based on David Swensen's experience managing the Yale endowment. You can find index funds to match that reasonably well. How different will that be from what Yale or a pension fund actually does?
The problem with using public index funds to mimic these managers asset allocations is the higher volatility of publicly traded assets. For example in 2008 widespread panic caused people to sell their mutual funds and flee to cash which widely hold a variety of assets, so all of them suffered. This included publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). At one point they were selling for 80% of their on paper asset value, which was entirely irrational. Many money managers that typically invested privately in commercial real estate because of that volatility took that opportunity to buy public REITs at a discount.
That being said, you can definitely do a decent job of adding asset class diversification with modern ETFs (and the market for these keeps growing). There are now infrastructure ETFs, REITs (Vanguard's REIT is really well priced), covered call ETFs, etc. Just don't expect to get exactly the same results of these managers and expect to have to handle larger volatility.
That being said, if you can weather these market movements, and you are saving regularly, volatility can be a good thing, if you can take advantage of lower asset prices with ongoing contribution then that is great.
And you can get aces to property by inversing in REIT's
In the case of $50m, you can fully invest it in the stock market, but you need to be ready for wild fluctuations in your wealth. You also need to make sure the brokerage you gave the money to is reputable, or multiple brokerages. (SIPC only covers up to $500,000). You also may accidently buy overly correlated products without knowing it or may think you are buying low risk (bond funds) only to find out that they had super high duration (risk from insurance rates changing).
You can always put it in banks, but even that can be risky in times of extreme turmoil. During the last crisis, there were about 6 months when people were genuinely unsure whether all major banks would stay solvent. You are only insured to FDIC limits which will not come close to $50m.
You could go with real estate, 100% cash purchase, where you have no debt. (no leverage). As long as you pick a liquid asset class, that is likely safe, but you still need to insure the property and make sure your management team is running it properly which requires a lot of hands on work. You could still lose a lot of money if rates go up etc.
Having $50m is really a mo money mo problems scenario. A robo advisor can't fix it if you don't want 100% stock market exposure. I also don't think expensive advisors fix it either.
Volatility doesn't seem to have as much power when the potential losses are not great enough to cripple you.
That's precisely why wealthy investors want to minimize volatility. They don't need their wealth to grow (they already have more than they need), but they definitely don't want it to disappear.
Also, I must say that $500k really isn't that much money—it's not even enough to retire.
SPY, QQQ, etc only go up as the economy goes up...
Which should have been "risk from interest rates changing."
> people who earn a millions, but are not savvy
> investors end up broke
Restaurants are a classic example of money pit 'investments', but so are a lot of real estate deals etc.
When you pay for "investment advice" at the $50 million net worth price tier, you're paying for access to private equity deals, real estate investment opportunities, a tax advisor who can tell you how to be structure a deal abroad, etc. It's not as simple as plugging in your salary and age into a webpage and having a robot buy and sell stocks for you.