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June 06, 2014 at 10:54 AM
Unless you’ve been living on Mars (or Venus, depending on your persuasion), you’ve undoubtedly come across a few of the myriad news stories about the invasion of the so-called “Robo-advisors,” and the “doom” it spells for old-school financial advisors.
In fairness, I’ve only begun to explore the brave new world of online portfolio management and financial advice. Yet even at this early stage, it seems as if a few observations are warranted, as we try to drill down into the algorithms behind automated advice, and the actual business models behind these high-tech websites. If the long—and often sordid—history of retail financial advice tells us anything, it’s this: there have always been individuals and institutions who offer “low-cost” or “free” financial advice; and it’s often extremely difficult to determine what retail clients/customers are actually getting, and how or how much they are actually paying for this “advice.”
By way of example, the other day a friend of mine was breathlessly singing the praises of SigFig.com, an online “investment company,” that creates and manages retail portfolios for $10 a month. On its site, SigFig bills itself as “a new kind of investment company: one that uses science and data to help everyday investors invest better…that puts people before profits.” It’s a message that seems to resonate with financial consumers: As of March, SigFig says it now “tracks” (whatever that means) $200 billion in assets, but apparently a significant portion of that sum is “tracked” for free—presumably in the hopes of converting those users into paying customers, as revealed in a CBS news video titled: “SigFig Debuts Free Money Management Service for Portfolios Under $10,000.”
But don’t feel too bad for the SigFig folks. Buried in its site are these two disclosures:
- “Brokerages compensate us for sending them new customers…”
- “Advisors compensate us a percentage of their management fee for sending them new clients…”
Sound familiar? But wait: there’s more!
To entice their loss-leader users into signing up for its paid portfolio management, SigFig compares their current portfolios to its “optimal” portfolio, concluding with statements about how much you “missed” in earnings, such as: ““We found several funds that perform up to 3.6% better than your fund… You could earn $5,325…”
How to they determine these “better” performing funds? Here’s what the SigFig site discloses: “We calculate missed earnings as the difference in cumulative performance of our best recommendation versus your current fund over the last three years.”
How’s that for a marketing angle? You tell me what you own, and I’ll find some funds that performed better and call the difference your “lost earnings.”
