by Patrick Garrett When’s the last time you heard about a robo-advisor adjusting its investment strategy based on a careful assessment of market conditions? We’re guessing … never.
Most robo-advisors don’t charge for brokerage – that’s good. But it can be a disincentive to making changes, because this triggers portfolio rebalances, which cost money. We haven’t seen any changes to core asset allocations from our peers in the market in the past two years.
In the past 12 months, Six Park has made a couple of important changes to its asset allocations (or introduced new asset classes) based on fundamental investment analysis by our experts. We made these changes, even though it costs us money in brokerage expenses, because it’s the right thing to do for our customers.
We believe building trust for the long term is more important than saving a few dollars in the short term.
November 2016: We added infrastructure as an asset class, and replaced domestic property with international property.
June 2017: We reduced overall allocations to bonds/fixed income, as we believe that we are entering a rising interest rate environment. You can read more about this change here.
Both these changes in the past year have cost us money but, we believe, put our customers in a better position for long-term growth. Have a look around and see if any other robo-advice services are doing the same.