What's considered diversity in investment? Do Robo-Advisors help me achieve this?

Yes, robo-advisors help achieve diversification with their asset allocation. This is agreed amongst all the replies. However, let me give an alternative perspective.

While your investments are diversified by asset class through your portfolio, if you put 100% of your capital into 1 robo-advisor, what we have now is investment in only 1 medium. Therefore, what we can do to further diversify is to invest in (you guessed it), multiple mediums.

While I noticed that most people on Seedly would rather do their investments on their own (RSP into ETFs, investment in robo-advisors, lump sum investment through brokerage, etc), I feel that having a portion of your money to invest through your financial advisor (endowment, savings plan, etc.) is also a form of diversification.

While the argument is that by doing so, there is "unnecessary" incurred fees and also less desirable returns, most of these plans do also have a surrender value and mimimum guaranteed return.

e.g. After your long investment horizon, you've reached retirement age. Few months prior to your retirement, the world experiences another bear market due to reasons such as another pandemic. Your self-invested investments are at net negative (worst case scenario) and you've wasted the x amount of years of investment.

If you had investments in an alternative medium (your FA), you would at least have a guaranteed capital amount in the form of matured product that you had bought which you can now use for said retirement.

Hope this makes sense. Just my 2 cents.

More like diversity in porfolio manager/platform

Hi there,

Thank you for this question and the short answer to your questions is yes, absolutely!

This is a list of our asset class universe. Each of our portfolios is diversified across 7-9 different asset classes (Equities, Bonds of different maturities), Gold, Real Estate, Commodities, etc) that span different geographic regions, industries and sectors.

For example, our StashAway Risk Index 22% portfolio which is equivalent to a 60-40 equity-bond portfolio, has exposure to US equities (via the S&P500), European Equities, Small-Cap Equities, the Consumer Discretionary sector, the Heathcare sector, Emerging Markets bonds, Gold, Inflation-linked government bonds.

If you would like to see the asset allocation of all of our other portfolios, you can do so by creating a "New Portfolio" in the app and toggling between them to see their asset breakdown :)

Hi anon, as the other replies have shared, using robo-advisors do help you achieve easy diversification for your investment portfolio. Perhaps I can briefly share more about Syfe's investment offerings so you can better weigh your options.

Syfe offers two investment portfolios: a Global Portfolio that invests in ETFs that are broadly diversified across asset classes, sectors and geographies, and a REIT+ portfolio that invests mainly in Singapore REITs.

You may consider the Global Portfolio and the REIT+ portfolio for exposure to both international stocks and local REITs. You can also set up your own "RSP" - all Syfe portfolios have no minimum investments and you can make monthly transfers without incurring additional brokerage fees.