Robo War Experiment (RWE) Update – April 2022

This Opinion post first appeared in my blog here: https://pwlcm.wordpress.com/2022/05/08/robo-war-experiment-rwe-update-april-2022/

This is a performance update to my Robo War Experiment (RWE) posted here: https://seedly.sg/opinions/robo-war-experiment-rwe-update-march-2022/

Disclaimer: This post is just for educational sharing purposes. Please do your own due diligence on any products mentioned in this post.

New Additions to Robo War Experiment

I have added MoneyOwl Equity100 (Dimensional Equity) and SquirrelSave Very Aggressive Portfolio (90% Equity / 10% Fixed Income) on 1st April 2022 to the experiment.

MoneyOwl Equity100 Portfolio is based on Dimensional Global Core Equity Fund (88%) and Dimensional Emerging Markets Large Cap Core Equity Fund (12%): https://www.moneyowl.com.sg/moneyowl-dimensional/

SquirrelSave offers 5 reference portfolios of various equity / fixed income mix, I have specifically selected the most aggressive 90% / 10% mix to be on par with the other robo advisors’ portfolios for comparison.

Interestingly, SquirrelSave published their own performance comparison against unnamed competitors (see the image below taken from SquirrelSave performance update for April 2022):

While they didn’t name the competitors, it is quite clear that the 3 competitors in the table are StashAway, Syfe and Endowus, in that sequence respectively. In fact, Competitor1.5, Competitor2.4 and Competitor3.5 portfolios in the table are the same 3 original portfolios in my Robo War Experiment (StashAway SRI36%, Syfe Equity100 and Endowus Equity100 respectively).

It would be interesting to compare my performance comparison against theirs. However, SquirrelSave had removed the monthly performance numbers from their comparison table for April 2022, which was included in their previous monthly updates. Not sure if they have removed those numbers because their April performance was the worst out of the 5 robo advisors' portfolios.

Performance Update

Here is the April 2022 Performance Update:

April 2022 saw a blood bath in the market (SquirrelSave called it brutal in their blog post), worse than that of January and February 2022. MoneyOwl and SquirrelSave are the 2 new entrants to the experiment and unfortunately they joined at a really bad timing.

Key Observations

1. All 5 robo advisors suffered losses in April 2022, StashAway the least, and SquirrelSave the worst.
2. Except for SquirrelSave, the other 4 robo advisors suffered less losses than the 3 benchmark indices.
3. As MoneyOwl and SquirrelSave only joined the experiment for a month, their annualized losses were amplified as seen in their XIRR.

Referral Links/Codes

Endowus: https://endowus.com/invite?code=J6YV3
Syfe: SRPTRJTFQ
StashAway: https://www.stashaway.sg/referrals/choonght43
MoneyOwl: https://moneyowl.com.sg/app/accounts/sign-up?referral_code=5FZY-58AG
SquirrelSave: https://app.squirrelsave.com.sg/Start/Referralcode?referralid=2996