Robo-advisors?

[zazpowered]

Are any of you guys using a robo-advisor such as Wealthfront or Betterment? What are your experiences like so far?

[Fred93]

I can't imagine why anyone would pay for robotic mechanical algorithmic advice.

[rawraw]

I can't imagine why anyone would pay for robotic mechanical algorithmic advice.

Surely that isn't true.  Don't you see how much of a problem most investors are to their returns?  We see glimpses of it often on this forum and we aren't even dealing in the very volatile stuff.

I do not use a roboadvisor (and most people like myself have trouble understanding why they are needed), but it seems like a decent approach to save most investors a lot of money in the long run.  Even if you have all the financial knowledge in the world, most (all?) investors just cannot overcome their psychological pitfalls of buying/selling at very bad times instead of staying the course.

[nonattender]

Are any of you guys using a robo-advisor such as Wealthfront or Betterment? What are your experiences like so far?

In Soviet Russia, investments trade you!

(You can keep the self-driving car, too...)

[brother7]

I have a friend who's young, not investment-savvy and wants to start a Roth IRA. I did some research and will advise her to look into Schwab Intelligent Portfolios.

UPDATE: As I did more research into robo-advisors, I found one of the main complaints about Schwab Intelligent Portfolios is cash drag. It seems the best-of-breed robo-advisors are Betterment and Wealthfront. It's a toss-up, with most comparisons I've read giving the very slight edge to Betterment.
Check out InvestorJunkie's reviews of robo-advisors, a deep-dive into every major player in the robo-advisor space.

[dmcnic]

Are any of you guys using a robo-advisor such as Wealthfront or Betterment? What are your experiences like so far?

I had an account on both Acorns and WiseBanyan for eight months just to see how they worked. Both were fine and did exactly what was expected.

For both accounts, I had to complete a questionnaire to establish my risk tolerance. On some questions, I can see new investors getting confused by the terms. At the conclusion, I can see other new investors becoming frustrated because the recommended investment portfolio doesn't make sense given what they have seen on financial media or heard in commercials.

I dropped WiseBanyan first because their statement was extraordinarily hard to understand. There were many micropayments into investment accounts and seemingly rebalancing taking place twice a month.

I dropped Acorns shortly after. The Acorns app was well designed and simplified the web site so I could make additional investments quickly. Of the two, I preferred Acorns.

[Osito]

I juse started using acorns a couple months back and yes it is simple to understand and use with their $1 dollar a month fee they charge right now as it stands I just broke even. 

I am in the high returns/risk portfolio there and have been just following it month to month I am hoping the fees don't out way the gains, and since I just broke even so far just keeping an eye on it to see how well it does or doesn't do.

Obviously this acorns is more for long term vs short term.

As far as robot advisors I am new to this note thing been doing some research and found some guidelines to follow as far as finding notes to buy.  Most of my notes were bought on automated and now I use guidelines found online for preset filters to compare how the presets do vs automatic buying.

So far auto buying is working better than me using presets but I'm still way to new and account to new to make any conclusive results.  (2 prepaid notes I have right now are from auto buy )