Important update! We have recently reviewed and updated our Forum Rules and FAQs. Please take the time to familiarise yourself with the latest version.
Wealthify - maximum gains and losses you've noticed
23 replies
3.7K views
OceanSound
Forumite 856 posts
What maximum gains and losses have you seen when keeping track of your plan and what is the maximum time period it's lasted?
I've just signed up for the ethical theme, with Tentative investment style.
Didn't pick the ISA, instead went for the General Investment Account plan type.
Initial investment of £300 with £20 monthly payments to follow.
What was your theme, style, plan type, Initial investment, monthly payment amount etc.?
and how often do you check the fund value and growth?
I've just signed up for the ethical theme, with Tentative investment style.
Didn't pick the ISA, instead went for the General Investment Account plan type.
Initial investment of £300 with £20 monthly payments to follow.
What was your theme, style, plan type, Initial investment, monthly payment amount etc.?
and how often do you check the fund value and growth?
0
Quick links
Essential Money | Who & Where are you? | Work & Benefits | Household and travel | Shopping & Freebies | About MSE | The MoneySavers Arms | Covid-19 & Coronavirus Support
Replies
Boring Money do some short term comparisons of the Robo charges and performance. The punchline is that you would do better with a low cost mixed asset fund (medium risk) or tracker fund (high risk) from Vangaurd, Blackrock, etc.
On the low risk options you would even have done better with a Cash ISA.
https://www.boringmoney.co.uk/learn/learning-paths/meet-the-robos/
Alex
I just want to stay with Wealthify long enough for the £40 clearscore incentive.
Just wondering if a downturn could eat in to the incentive, and worse, the £400 investment.
You can start your own thread on this topic in the main Savings & Investments forum with more information about how you became aware of this. It's probably either an investment product carrying risk or an outright scam. Stick with the MSE savings besy buy table for FSCS protected products.
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/savings-accounts-best-interest/
I just annonymously started to setup a Wealthify Tentative Ethical portfolio and it gave an asset allocation with roughly 30% equities (shares) and 70% fixed income (bonds). This is very low risk but yes it could drop by more than 10% in certain adverse market conditions. It would be particularly sensitive to interest rate increases depending on the duration of the bonds.
Alex
Certainly it could, as with any stock market investment. One of the Wealthify portfolios was down nearly 8% over a 1 year period in 2018, for example (according to that comparison page; I didn't check myself). I'd say that sort of fluctuation is to be expected for such a short time period.
If you invested £400 and they gave you £40 on top, and then it went down 8% again just when you wanted to take your money out, you'd come out with a ~£4 profit. If it went down further than 8%, you'd make a loss.
You could also get lucky and make some kind of decent return, however.
It's unfortunate that that comparison webpage didn't cover longer time periods, because it's only really then that you see how abysmal these robo-advisor portfolios are.
Wealthify claim their lifetime best performance (over 3 years) was +25.5%.
If you had invested in a global index tracker over the same period, you'd have made about 46%. Comparing more established robo-advisors over longer periods shows the same story. They all greatly underperform the average stock market return.
Now, as per the comparison page, the negative swing of a global index tracker could be larger than that of a particular robo portfolio in a particular short time period. But if you're after a long term investment, your future self will thank you if you switch from robos as soon as you're able.
I'm currently in the process of closing it, as I no longer need the DD.
I did find my robo-IFA's behaviour a little disturbing though
Your money may go "down and up and down and up and down and up and down ... down and up and down and up and down and up and down ... I got all tricked up and came up to this thing, lookin' so fire hot, a twenty out of ten..."
When I created the plan it just asked me 'what is your investment style', and I selected 'tentative'. Now, I can see tentative comprises of:
* Cash - 0.75%
* Corporate Bonds - 19.58%
* Shares - 29.84%
* Government Bonds - 47.01%
* Bonds - 0.82%
* Alternatives - 2%
If I had selected 'cautious'. this would have been:
* Cash - 0.75%
* Corporate Bonds - 32.43%
* Shares - 11.01%
* Government Bonds - 52.46%
* Bonds - 1.35%
* Alternatives - 2%
Edit: Ok. your post did say 'it gave'. so, they are already preset. You cannot tweak them. I realize this now.
Which portfolio/plan?...do you have a link to the comparison page please.
I seem to have a graph covering the period 12 February 2016 – 11 February 2017:
https://www.wealthify.com/blog/wealthify-s-12-month-results
Maybe together with your 2018 one year period, we can get some idea how plans performed over two years (albeit not a continuous two year period)?
If you are only after the bonus then you are low risk so it is unlikely you lose more than the bonus.
If you are serious about investing long term there are better options than robo investors. If you invest properly in funds the historic data is all presented nicely in standard ways to enable easy comparison.
Alex
JPM don't offer retail deposit products in the UK* - this will be a scammer pretending to be JP Morgan, and you should report it to the FCA:
https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers/report-scam-unauthorised-firm
To be clear, JPM do offer funds and investment trusts in the UK, and these are not scams!
* They might in the future. but they don't now:
https://www.bankingtech.com/2019/06/jp-morgans-secretive-uk-digital-bank-plans-revealed/