How does Endowus' and Stashaway's investment strategies differ? What are the pros/cons of their strategies?

Hi Vishaag,

Our investment strategies varies widely.

Stashaway looks to maximise returns and minimise risk while actively managing portfolio allocation, through the ERAA, using publicly listed ETFs.

Endowus does a equity:bond allocation based on clients' risk profile, while giving them access to low cost, SGD-hdeged bond solutions which will take out FX volatility in low risk portfolio, through exclusive all-in low fund products,
Endowus, as a Financial Advisor, attempts to give our clients a broad based exposure, benchmarked against the MSCI All Country World Index. For cash and SRS, we use the SGD denominated Dimensional World Equity Fund, which has 11,000 underlying securities. Access to this fund is exclusive to Endowus. Dimensional was founded in 1981, Dimensional has a long history of applying academic research to practical investing, led by Noble prize winning Eugene Fama and Kenneth French.

For CPF, we bring in low cost indexed options that are exclusive to us as well, so that clients' investment outcomes are better.

Hey there Vishaag,

I am currently actually using both of them. (and one more Syfe for my Joint account investments, but I will write about them another day)

You can read my FULL independent reviews on SeedlyReviews for Stashaway, EndowUs and Syfe at the respective links.

Stashaway vs EndowUs

Both are pretty awesome so far in terms of the ease of use, UI, features and most importantly returns, having used both so far. :)

Stashaway has a way better mobile app experience where EndowUs lacks currently but I'm sure they will develop on this soon.

Ways you can invest through these platforms:

Stashaway

• Cash - I'm using this option_

• SRS (supplementary retirement scheme)

EndowUs

• Cash

• SRS (supplementary retirement scheme)

• CPFIS (basically investing using your CPF Ordinary Account Funds) - I'm using this option, really seamless so far for me

It is important to note here that customers can both setup DCA (Dollar Cost Averaging), which is often highly recommended for beginners, using a really simple option of either recurring bank transfer, like GIRO or direct CPF access where they will perform a transaction on your behalf monthly.

On the strategies:

Yes you are also accurate, they defer slightly but essentially both buy up either index ETFs which track the movements of markets mostly US based or funds which they assemble on their own.

"Endowus seem to use DFA and PIMCO whereas, Stashway, from what I have read, uses ETFs. What else are their differences?"

What you have noted are the underlying assets...

• EndowUs uses funds - Dimensional Funds (for equities) and PIMCO bond funds

• Stashaway directly buys Index ETFs

*For the Dimensional Advisors Funds (DFAs) it used to be only be accesibile to higher net worth investors, but essentially what they do is buy a basket of shares which they picked on their own backed by huge amounts of emperical research.

*For the PIMCO bond fund, it is also a diverse, actively managed portfolio of global fixed-income securities.

Both also offer auto-rebalancing where they may buy or sell assets in your portfolio when there are price movements.

Stashaway has created their own strategy which is called the ERRA (Economic Regime-based Asset Allocation) some fancy name but you can read more here on how it has the objective of helping investors navigate the ups and downs of the economy by harnessing a large number of persistent and high-quality signals from economic data.

So far having invested through Stashaway for the past 3 years I can say that whatever they are doing is working so far (for me) at a 16% risk profile.

"Also, Endowus uses UOB Kay Hain as brokerage, but I'm not sure what Stashaway uses. How does this factor affect for a customer?"

This is a pretty interesting question actually... good thinking :)

What I really liked having invested through Endowus only since the start of 2020 is that they offer the huge sense of security with UOB Kay Hian where you get a monthly statement (by mail) about your portfolio progress and how it's all safe and sound as they are the custodian bank.

However for Stashaway, fret not, just because you don't get a statement by mail, does not mean your money is unsafe.

They use a custodian bank as well where in the event that they close down, your deposits and investments are still held securely. You can read more here.

Our custodian bank for receiving your deposits is DBS Bank while Saxo Capital Markets Pte Ltd holds our custodian account for your investable cash and securities.

Another question you should ask is also about withdrawal...

What I can say is that withdrawal has been really easy for Stashaway, I did mine recently for some amount and it took 2 days, really quick process and it entered my bank account really swiftly.

For EndowUs as well both deposits and withdrawals work smoothly without any charges if you use cash :)

However, I'm using my CPFIS account for this EndowUs portfolio so the bank charges here are around $2.50 per trade (IN or OUT).

Hope this in-depth answer helps! :)

Please leave a comment If I can be more of assistance!​​​