facebookUnofficial 1 Year Robo-advisors experiment (2021) - Seedly

Quek KY

Edited 23 Aug 2022

General Investing

Unofficial 1 Year Robo-advisors experiment (2021)

Intro

  1. Last year, I wanted to compare between most of the Robo-advisor
  2. I am only willing to use SGD to invest
  3. I did not learn much of investment knowledge at that time, basically just went in blindly

Experiment:

- Aug 2021 to Jul 2022 (Risk level - high)

Experiment steps:

  • Lumpsum a huge amount on 2nd week of Aug 2021 to all 3 Robo-advisor
  • DCA a small amount monthly from Sep 2021 to Jul 2022 to all 3 Robo-advisor, on 8th of the month

Portfolios:

  1. Endowus Core 100% Equity (now known as Flagship)
  2. MoneyOwl Dimensional Equity (100% Equity)
  3. Syfe Core Equity100

My personal views

  1. In general the whole market downturn starting from Dec-2022, which cause the negative returns
  2. I’ve since read up a lot of investment and trading this year, esp on US market
  3. Knowledge is power
  4. S&P500 and NASDAQ may have better returns in long runs compared to Robo-advisors
  5. Robo-advisors do not protect you from market crash
  6. Robo-advisors’ fees is higher than US Stocks and ETF (even after rebates), in long run ETF may yield higher returns due to compound effect

Discussion (7)

What are your thoughts?

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To answer some of the questions:

  • Initially in Jan 2021, when my risk level was medium, I tested between Stashaway and FSM MAPS. However I did not publish the results as the timeline was different to these 3, it won't be accurate to compare
  • Around Jul 2021, I googled search and speed-read up on some blogs, found there's other robo-advisor also, so I signed up for all of them (thus these 3 remaining) and did another 1 year experiment. That time all blogs were talking about these 4 (and Kristal.AI which is in USD and looks complicated at that time) I might have missed out some other robo at that time. At the same time I re-assess my risk to be high
  • Whole of last year, I was busy, so I did not take much time to read into investing. I thought robo-advisors were good since most of the blogs talk good about them (and also due to their ads in FB, there's no ad about ETF), and also the signup bonus that time
  • I did buy stocks on CDP previously 10+ years ago before. Comparing robo fees to CDP, robo are very low (below 1% pa compare to S$30 per trade) At that time my thinking is, if I DCA $100/mth, no way I can buy stocks (PS: its my thinking that time coz I only had experience with CDP and banks. My thinking had changed now)
  • That time, I just wanna pay someone in SGD and let them handle everything, I dont want to deal with the conversion myself
  • Anyway, fast forward 6 months (ard Xmas), I had some time to read up more on trading and investment. However I just continue the experiment. But now that it had ended, I've just stop DCA into them
  • SA gave me quite bad results, most months are negative. Now when I look back and compare to other ETF, I dunno why I chose that

Anyway I backtested the same amount in SPY & QQQ, MWRR is -9.73% and -18.15% respectively.

This is just an experiment, not an official report of how the robos perform. Also, past results do not mean it’ll perform the same result in the future

View 1 replies

Thanks for sharing KY! I am curious why did you select these 3 robos over others?

Your risk level is medium but you set the portfolios risk level as high. not right.

syfe core does ...

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