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by rkalla 1599 days ago
When I think of what a FinTech darling Wealthfront was when it came out, all I can see this is as a colossal flop.

For what it's worth...

About a year ago I opened a robo-advisor account at SoFi and another at Wealthfront and pitted them against each other with high-risk/default settings and a weekly deposit.

The SoFi one has been outperforming the Wealthfront one all year long (by 1-2%; nothing life changing) which surprised me but it also made me feel that all the magic AI/ML under the covers that WF promoted didn't exist and no one was managing anything.

2 comments

Stock returns over a single year are meaningless and not what they optimize for. Their "optimization" isn't perfect (MPT has some silly assumptions) but it's made for 30 years from now.
Has it continued to outperform Wealthfront during the past couple of weeks, where the markets have been trending more downward? Curious if SoFi has a higher-risk 'high-risk' setting than Wealthfront, in which case you might expect them to take more of a hit when the markets go down.