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Financial Advisers Disrupted By AI (bloomberg.com)
schwit1 writes: Banks are watching wealthy clients flirt with robo-advisers, and that's one reason the lenders are racing to release their own versions of the automated investing technology this year, according to a consultant. Robo-advisers, which use computer programs to provide investment advice online, typically charge less than half the fees of traditional brokerages, which cost at least 1 percent of assets under management.
A lot of American and Canadian retirement accounts are in "age adjusted" funds, which are really just a mix of mutual funds or ETFs of bond funds and stock funds.
If you check, you'll find most large firms have an S&P 500 index from Vanguard or Fidelity (like the VINIX) which has an expense ratio of around 0.02 or 0.04 percent, and a Total Stock Market index with an expense ratio of around 0.05 or 0.07 percent and a Total Bond Market index with an expense ration of around 0.10 or 0.12 percent.
You could replace the "age adjusted" fund that charges you 0.40 to 0.65 percent with an automatic stock fund and bond fund allocation, e.g. 70/30, and then just reallocate periodically. Cost to you drops from 0.40 to 0.05 percent, in many cases.
That's all these "wealth firm robots" really do. You can buy the underlying components and pay less.
It's the fees that kill you. You don't notice them when returns are 12 percent, but when the market is crawling (like today) with 1-2 percent returns, you sure notice the fees that siphon off up to 1/4 of your earnings.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And who trusts Financial "Advisors" - regardless of if they are human or AI?
I trust Bogleheads. Financial advisers are really just salesmen.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Investing in a diversified selection of index funds and staying the course will beat that vast majority of professional advisers. And the few advisers that will beat the market are not identifiable ahead of time.