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Re:UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B by blobbers on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @12:23PM (#30088467)
A lot of you likely invest in a boglehead style.

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.

Re:UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B by prepend on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @12:55PM (#30089016)
When I looked at it the fees were way to high to justify to bogelheads.

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.

Re:UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B by teej on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @05:52PM (#30093269)
Tax loss harvesting alone has more than paid the 25 bps fee that Wealthfront charges. It's a no-brainer to me. I'm very happy with Wealthfront.
Re:UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B by xur17 on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @02:19PM (#30090364)
Agreed. To me target date retirement funds honestly make more sense for most people.
Re:UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B by tinalumfoil on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @03:55PM (#30091684)
I'm not sure about that. Targets funds fees are generally a percent not flat, you have less control over your money (which if you're doing a robo-advisor you probably have somewhat bespoke investing requirements) and they only make sense for tax-advantaged accounts (see [1]).

Plus, people invest for reasons other than dated retirement targets.

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/vanguard-target-retirement-tax-...

Re:UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B by atuladhar on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @12:42PM (#30088761)
Marcus bought HonestDollar, which is in the same space, a while ago, and has rebranded it as "Marcus Invest" * https://www.honestdollar.com/ * https://www.marcus.com/us/en/invest
Re:UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B by mbesto on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @05:34PM (#30093079)
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.

Re:UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B by zylepe on Thursday January 27, 2022 @07:01AM (#30099462)
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 contributions that happen…

Re:UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B by adammenges on Friday January 28, 2022 @05:24PM (#30121284)
Thought about integrating it with Alpacha?
Re:UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B by msoad on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @12:36PM (#30088683)
Did anyone get any real beta out of it for a sustainable period?
Re:UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B by im_asl on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @01:27PM (#30089584)
*Alpha
Re:UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B by blobbers on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @01:10PM (#30089282)
beta is correlation to the market (usually refers to SPY correlation). Not sure what you're saying.
Re:UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B by msoad on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @04:21PM (#30092070)
sorry I meant alpha. oops