A Disappointing Review Of GrabInvest After 5 Months

Yup, you read that right, a grand total of 15 cents.

TL;DR: How This Works and Why You Should Stick to your Robo-advisor

• For every transaction I spend on GrabFood, GrabPay, Grab Transport

• $1 automatically gets 'invested' via GrabInvest into a Money Market Fund

• So far, from a total of 81 transactions, thus $81 invested

• The returns are a grand total of $0.15 (+0.34%)

Update: I am really unsure how does GrabInvest calculate the returns of 0.34% because if you just look at a pure simple interest, It should be only 0.18%. I will update this piece once I also get a reply from the GrabInvest team

You should just stick to your Robo-advisor and set up some dollar cost average (DCA) into a similar money market fund plan.

For a direct comparison with other money market funds with the Robos in Singapore with similar cash savings accounts:

• Syfe cash+ (1.75% )

• EndowUs Cash Smart (1.6% pa)

• Stashaway Simple (1.4% pa)

• MoneyOwl WiseSaver (0.65% pa)

Let's Break This Down Further...

Yawn... $0.15 cents. This makes up an actual return of 0.34%. (or even less based on my own calculations)

And you are totally right. I'm kinda disappointed becaue this was not exactly what was promised to investors.

The range was projected to be around 1.8% p.a.

If you recall, when it was launched, I wrote about it here. Where I shared that it was more like cashback and how excited I was about it.

However, I hate to break it to you... This GrabInvest is not even acting as a cashback mechanism.

I'm honestly not sure what this really is, more like a forced savings mechanism for future spending? So you have some money left for another day to spend on GrabFood or GrabPay? Note, all returns are stuck in the Grab Wallet.

Breakdown Of Returns

Every month, they will send over a chart which looks like this via email. And transactions which they buy. You can have a deeper look at this after the 81 transaction ($81 invested in around 5 months)

Portfolio Holding Breakdown ($81 worth)

Every Investment breakdown ($1 each time)

As you can see below, each $1 transaction is broken down into the 4 types of classes of money market funds which is bought.

Literally in cents! This is quite interesting nonetheless... of some form of micro-investing.

In Conclusion: Stick To your Robo-Advisors If You Want To Invest For Your Future

Honestly, as someone who is reading this, you are better off investing on your own using robo-advisors.

And recently, they have all moved into some form of money market savings plans, where you can 'save up' with higher interest rates between 1.5% to 1.8% as well if you want little to no risk.

Here's one thing for sure...

You will probably not have hundreds of thousands of dollars in your GrabInvest wallet by the time you turn 55 years old.

So again, you should stick to proper investment vehicles and platforms which serve the main focus of growing your wealth for the long term.