I’ve been talking to wealth management firms and am truly underwhelmed. AFAICT, they charge 0.5%-1.35% for therapy and the chance to put you in high fee products. Roboadvisors are a brilliant product for most people. In fact, a simple Boglehead portfolio is all you need. Most people have simple and similar risk profiles.
The feature I think would be useful is how to manage taxes. Roth conversions, selling the right lot, qualified dividends, tax loss harvesting, etc. A related feature would be generating income while minimizing taxes, i.e. Schwab’s Intelligent Income.
Betterment's roboadvisor has tax loss harvesting. It does the basics like selling the right lot; I'm not educated enough about finance to say what it's still missing (that would be easy for a bot to do).
> If you have more than $100k, you get a human advisor who charges 1-1.5% annually to... basically do the same thing with a smile and calming voice attached.
Maybe the crackpot scam ones. But I'm very happy with Vanguard's 0.15% or Schwab's 0.8% fee. I also personally am paying someone to tell me "no." I like the friction making changes to my portfolio and I like the trust I have with my advisor.
The website says a lot of surface level, "X, Y, and Z doesn't do these things well, but we do it better!" without actually explaining how you doing it better or what is better.
For example, robot advertises allow you to customize your portfolio based on your personal risk appetite. But your website claims they don't allow customizations. I'm guessing you can allow people to be even more specific (focus on income, international, etc) than they offer? But I have no idea why their customization level isn't good enough for me.
> Access the same high-quality investment strategies used by the world's top institutions, not just cookie-cutter limited funds.
I have no idea what "high-quality investment strategies" actually means. My Financial Advisor uses automatic rebalancing tools and tax loss harvesting tools.
Features like "saving for a car" aren't interesting to me.
I'd just argue that even the 0.8% from Schwab is $4,000 on their minimum of $500,000. Where I worked (high networth wealth management at large bank) we had a minimum of 1 million and the starter fee was 1.35% or 13,500 annually. Definitely not a crack pot scam advisor and the portfolio management we did was very similar to what we've built out on this app.
We're doing more advanced portfolio construction at the client level then what you're going to get from Schwab and it's $100 a year vs $4000. If the relationship aspect of the advisory channel is important to you, then totally valid and fair point. This platform is aimed at the middle-market of people who aren't financially able to meet those minimums but want a better service then just automated portfolios.
> Customization
Great point! We would just not consider risk appetite an actual customization. After you've selected your risk, you're placed/bucketed into one of five portfolios that they offer and manage themselves.
What we do is factor in the risk appetite of the user plus the goal itself (whether you have a date you want the funds for or the importance of the goal) and then model it against evolving capital market expectations featuring 30+ domestic & global asset classes, constructing the optimal ETF portfolio to meet your return requirement at the lowest risk possible.
> Investment strategies
Another good point that we need to make more clear. We are modeling these portfolios using an institutional model with a wide range of asset classes and a "glidepath" (target date) structure like the US retirement portfolios. This prioritizes capital accumulation at earlier stages and then de-risks the portfolio gradually to make sure you have the capital you need as you reach your goal. It's a dynamic portfolio that evolves over time.
> you're placed/bucketed into one of five portfolios that they offer and manage themselves.
this doesn't seem to be very different from what robo advisors do... where as they say, group you with the other people that have the same risk profile as you.
> What we do is factor in the risk appetite of the user plus the goal itself
I need some examples, b/c the goals you listed seem weird. Like trying to save $4k for a vacation, or car, seems like investing products aren't the right choice. You should keep that money cash in a HYSA and buy the thing when you have enough. If you're working with people with retirement funds, they probably would just cash out from their existing portfolio when they need to buy the expensive item.
> with a wide range of asset classes and a "glidepath" (target date) structure
I need to experiment more with the tools, but for high networth individuals with modest spending, glidepath models hurt long-term returns. For example, if someone invests $2,000/month for 45 years with a 9% real return, they could end up with $12.6M in an S&P 500 portfolio. At today’s 1.27% dividend yield, that’s $160K/year in passive income, which is enough to cover an 2x the average American lifestyle. So why shift away from an aggressive portfolio like the S&P 500 in retirement? If there is a big draw down in the market at the start of retirement, reducing the portfolio to $6.3m (half!), keeping 1 yr cash, reduce expenses by 20%, and as the market recovers you'd only pull out 1-5 years of money (2.5% per year - dividend payouts). Obviously, not ideal, but you're still not going be homeless at age 90.
1. None of our portfolios are static or bucketed. We run the model on each goal/portfolio and it produces the optimal portfolio for that set of circumstances (goal, time horizon, risk, expected return).
2. You're 100% right, goals like vacation & car are going to be variable depending on the users inputs when creating the goal. We have a confidence question in the goal creation, ie. "how important is this goal to you". If the user selects that they have to have it by their given date, the model is going to opt for money market funds and potentially a small allocation to a return generating asset. This goal would lean heavily on the users contributions and not returns.
On the flip side, if it's something like a vacation fund where you are okay with not having a strict deadline ("nice to have, not certain"), then the model will have access to more return generating assets to help the portfolio generate a return. This is more about financial planning then it is pure investing. You're 100% right, but the user controls their own fate there.
3. Again you are correct that historically, an all S&P500 portfolio will have out-performed a target date portfolio but who's doing that? What institution, advisor or robo would advocate that any client is 100% invested in US equities?
We're not targeting pure performance here, it's risk adjusted returns factoring in for large drawdowns. We can model a portfolio that returns the exact same average 30-yr trailing return as the S&P500 at half the expected volatility (not really a brag, that's what robos and portfolio managers are trying to do as well).
If you're the type of person who can handle the volatility of investing in a 1 ETF portfolio then the product here isn't for you. I'd just recommend that you go and check the capital market expectations for the S&P500 over the next 10-25 years because it's actually trailing behind other global equities.
Blackrock has the following CMAs:
Ex-US equities
5 yr : 9.0%
10 yr: 8.6%
20 yr: 8.0%
vol: 16.9%
US equities
5 yr: 6.2%
10 yr: 6.7%
20 yr: 7.4%
vol: 18.4%
Forward looking estimates of course, but you can see my point. You're not even getting the optimal 1 ETF portfolio by simply buying SP500.
Can you give an example? I feel like you didn’t answer any of their questions and I am genuinely curious about what these things mean. “Institutional model”?
what does customization mean beyond time and risk?
It’s sounding like you you have a bucket of etfs that you call risky (Russel 2000, emerging market) and things that you call safe (bonds, debt, large cap) and depending on my time horizon and risk I start with a certain portfolio and you systematically roll into more “safe” based on my time horizon?
For sure! Let's take a pension fund as an example. When asset managers are looking at getting the returns to meet future obligations they are not simply looking at a simple formula of risk-adjusted returns. What they're actually doing is combining factors such as liquidity, time-horizon, hedging across multiple countries, geographies and (most importantly) asset classes. All of that is to say that they need to be sure that on date "X" they are able to meet forecasted obligation "Y".
That's the approach we've taken here. Pooling capital market expectations for 30+ global asset classes and taking into consideration the risk basis, time horizon, the financial goal (ie. is this a general wealth building portfolio or your retirement fund) and then yes, creating rules & heuristics around the type of asset classes that are appropriate for that unique situation. Then as the portfolio ages and your "path" matures (we use a glidepath structure to maintain a volatility cap over the lifetime of the portfolio), the portfolio dynamically adjusts the risk downwards and into a less volatile portfolio that favors capital preservation over accumulation.
All that is done through publicly traded ETFs that represent the asset classes but it's more granular then the way you typed it out. Rather then just being "large cap" it would be "US Large Cap", "ex-US Large Cap", "European Large Cap", "APAC Large Cap", etc. It's not just about risk though, with the most obvious modern example being crypto. Most advisors in 2025 are saying 2.5-5% of a portfolio can go into the asset class but does that make sense if you're investing for a down payment on a house in 5 years? You're going to want higher returning assets that are less volatile like infrastructure equity or private credit (same return profile, less volatile).
The net result is far greater risk adjusted returns and likelihood of actually achieving your financial goals because you've built your overall portfolio piece by piece with the goals as the building blocks.
The platform isn't clear, as I visited the platform. Only the FAQ provides adequate information about your platform, which isn't enough.
You must convey and deliver you you are, and why we should consider you in first place. You can write as:- A safe wealth management and optimization space, custom tailored on geographics, demographics, income, areas of expertise....., controlled and utilized by yourself, in guidance from experienced professionals and custom solution or something similar.
And if you're successful with conveying, let that to be tested by alpha or beta users, give the beta access to the HN community or targeted users so that they can feel the difference. You've mentioned the alpha results, but if I haven't seen or someone haven't seen and have access, we can't provide specific POV on core product and features.
The website says “$8.50/month” and “$99 billed annually” for Pro Annual. Those numbers are inconsistent. $99 annually is $8.25/month. Usually, one would expect a wealth management service to be able to divide 99 by 12 correctly. Failing to do this is not very encouraging.
Monthly doesn't make sense either. Is it monthly or is it quarterly? $10/month > $29 quarterly.
Whether it's legit or not, it's seeming like a lot of Show HN posts that make the front page are giving vibes of "Ah, another AI generated tailwind/Stripe template that collects emails and was slapped together in an hour". They have SEC registration but don't have literally any information on their about us for a company I'd need to be able to trust
Very fair comments, platform was not slapped together with AI. Landing redesign, was. We're in the process of putting a more robust about us page now with more details about us and the company.
The discount is applied to $10/month and is said to make it effectively $8.5 per month, but is actually $8.25 per month, since they claim to charge $99 per year.
Then that would be $100 per year and none of your numbers for annual plans are accurate. Your website claims $99 per year and claims that is equivalent to $8.50 per month. None of these 3 numbers are equivalent.
So I entered my email in "request access". You proceed to send me an email with no information on how to get access? But I must and I quote "Reply with 'YES' + your favorite ice-cream flavor within 48 hours to lock your spot" - and this is regards to "VIP Founder's Circle". What's is this? How am I supposed to take you seriously? And yet these email provides zero information on how to actually get access to your application. Why would I want your "VIP Spot" which I apparently "claimed" if I can't even create an account to see what you offer?
The product is in early days and in a closed alpha right now. We're looking for test users that are willing to work with us and provide feedback as we squash bugs and build out the platform out of it's infancy.
What you just described is the whole point. If you just responded to that email, one of the co-founders would reach out directly with a question or two and next steps.
We know we are dealing with a touchy but all important subject of managing people's wealth/investments, so it would be irresponsible to allow open account creation and access to investment recommendations without doing our due diligence as founders at this stage.
You might not like the approach (totally fair), but it's brought us incredibly engaged and enthusiastic initial users who's feedback is directly going back into the app in a quick iterative loop.
Just the landing page according to their other comment, but the basic errors in pricing don’t inspire confidence in the rest of their system…
To be fair though, their answers to some other questions here seemed thorough, but I don’t know much about finance so for all I know those are just AI slop lol.
I’ve been talking to wealth management firms and am truly underwhelmed. AFAICT, they charge 0.5%-1.35% for therapy and the chance to put you in high fee products. Roboadvisors are a brilliant product for most people. In fact, a simple Boglehead portfolio is all you need. Most people have simple and similar risk profiles.
The feature I think would be useful is how to manage taxes. Roth conversions, selling the right lot, qualified dividends, tax loss harvesting, etc. A related feature would be generating income while minimizing taxes, i.e. Schwab’s Intelligent Income.
Betterment's roboadvisor has tax loss harvesting. It does the basics like selling the right lot; I'm not educated enough about finance to say what it's still missing (that would be easy for a bot to do).
https://www.betterment.com/tax-loss-harvesting
https://www.betterment.com/resources/tax-loss-harvesting-met...
> Still have questions?
The button below this doesn't seem to work.
> If you have more than $100k, you get a human advisor who charges 1-1.5% annually to... basically do the same thing with a smile and calming voice attached.
Maybe the crackpot scam ones. But I'm very happy with Vanguard's 0.15% or Schwab's 0.8% fee. I also personally am paying someone to tell me "no." I like the friction making changes to my portfolio and I like the trust I have with my advisor.
The website says a lot of surface level, "X, Y, and Z doesn't do these things well, but we do it better!" without actually explaining how you doing it better or what is better.
For example, robot advertises allow you to customize your portfolio based on your personal risk appetite. But your website claims they don't allow customizations. I'm guessing you can allow people to be even more specific (focus on income, international, etc) than they offer? But I have no idea why their customization level isn't good enough for me.
> Access the same high-quality investment strategies used by the world's top institutions, not just cookie-cutter limited funds.
I have no idea what "high-quality investment strategies" actually means. My Financial Advisor uses automatic rebalancing tools and tax loss harvesting tools.
Features like "saving for a car" aren't interesting to me.
Great feedback!
I'd just argue that even the 0.8% from Schwab is $4,000 on their minimum of $500,000. Where I worked (high networth wealth management at large bank) we had a minimum of 1 million and the starter fee was 1.35% or 13,500 annually. Definitely not a crack pot scam advisor and the portfolio management we did was very similar to what we've built out on this app.
We're doing more advanced portfolio construction at the client level then what you're going to get from Schwab and it's $100 a year vs $4000. If the relationship aspect of the advisory channel is important to you, then totally valid and fair point. This platform is aimed at the middle-market of people who aren't financially able to meet those minimums but want a better service then just automated portfolios.
> Customization
Great point! We would just not consider risk appetite an actual customization. After you've selected your risk, you're placed/bucketed into one of five portfolios that they offer and manage themselves.
What we do is factor in the risk appetite of the user plus the goal itself (whether you have a date you want the funds for or the importance of the goal) and then model it against evolving capital market expectations featuring 30+ domestic & global asset classes, constructing the optimal ETF portfolio to meet your return requirement at the lowest risk possible.
> Investment strategies
Another good point that we need to make more clear. We are modeling these portfolios using an institutional model with a wide range of asset classes and a "glidepath" (target date) structure like the US retirement portfolios. This prioritizes capital accumulation at earlier stages and then de-risks the portfolio gradually to make sure you have the capital you need as you reach your goal. It's a dynamic portfolio that evolves over time.
> you're placed/bucketed into one of five portfolios that they offer and manage themselves.
this doesn't seem to be very different from what robo advisors do... where as they say, group you with the other people that have the same risk profile as you.
> What we do is factor in the risk appetite of the user plus the goal itself
I need some examples, b/c the goals you listed seem weird. Like trying to save $4k for a vacation, or car, seems like investing products aren't the right choice. You should keep that money cash in a HYSA and buy the thing when you have enough. If you're working with people with retirement funds, they probably would just cash out from their existing portfolio when they need to buy the expensive item.
> with a wide range of asset classes and a "glidepath" (target date) structure
I need to experiment more with the tools, but for high networth individuals with modest spending, glidepath models hurt long-term returns. For example, if someone invests $2,000/month for 45 years with a 9% real return, they could end up with $12.6M in an S&P 500 portfolio. At today’s 1.27% dividend yield, that’s $160K/year in passive income, which is enough to cover an 2x the average American lifestyle. So why shift away from an aggressive portfolio like the S&P 500 in retirement? If there is a big draw down in the market at the start of retirement, reducing the portfolio to $6.3m (half!), keeping 1 yr cash, reduce expenses by 20%, and as the market recovers you'd only pull out 1-5 years of money (2.5% per year - dividend payouts). Obviously, not ideal, but you're still not going be homeless at age 90.
1. None of our portfolios are static or bucketed. We run the model on each goal/portfolio and it produces the optimal portfolio for that set of circumstances (goal, time horizon, risk, expected return).
2. You're 100% right, goals like vacation & car are going to be variable depending on the users inputs when creating the goal. We have a confidence question in the goal creation, ie. "how important is this goal to you". If the user selects that they have to have it by their given date, the model is going to opt for money market funds and potentially a small allocation to a return generating asset. This goal would lean heavily on the users contributions and not returns.
On the flip side, if it's something like a vacation fund where you are okay with not having a strict deadline ("nice to have, not certain"), then the model will have access to more return generating assets to help the portfolio generate a return. This is more about financial planning then it is pure investing. You're 100% right, but the user controls their own fate there.
3. Again you are correct that historically, an all S&P500 portfolio will have out-performed a target date portfolio but who's doing that? What institution, advisor or robo would advocate that any client is 100% invested in US equities?
We're not targeting pure performance here, it's risk adjusted returns factoring in for large drawdowns. We can model a portfolio that returns the exact same average 30-yr trailing return as the S&P500 at half the expected volatility (not really a brag, that's what robos and portfolio managers are trying to do as well).
If you're the type of person who can handle the volatility of investing in a 1 ETF portfolio then the product here isn't for you. I'd just recommend that you go and check the capital market expectations for the S&P500 over the next 10-25 years because it's actually trailing behind other global equities.
Blackrock has the following CMAs:
Ex-US equities
5 yr : 9.0% 10 yr: 8.6% 20 yr: 8.0% vol: 16.9%
US equities
5 yr: 6.2% 10 yr: 6.7% 20 yr: 7.4% vol: 18.4%
Forward looking estimates of course, but you can see my point. You're not even getting the optimal 1 ETF portfolio by simply buying SP500.
Can you give an example? I feel like you didn’t answer any of their questions and I am genuinely curious about what these things mean. “Institutional model”? what does customization mean beyond time and risk?
It’s sounding like you you have a bucket of etfs that you call risky (Russel 2000, emerging market) and things that you call safe (bonds, debt, large cap) and depending on my time horizon and risk I start with a certain portfolio and you systematically roll into more “safe” based on my time horizon?
For sure! Let's take a pension fund as an example. When asset managers are looking at getting the returns to meet future obligations they are not simply looking at a simple formula of risk-adjusted returns. What they're actually doing is combining factors such as liquidity, time-horizon, hedging across multiple countries, geographies and (most importantly) asset classes. All of that is to say that they need to be sure that on date "X" they are able to meet forecasted obligation "Y".
That's the approach we've taken here. Pooling capital market expectations for 30+ global asset classes and taking into consideration the risk basis, time horizon, the financial goal (ie. is this a general wealth building portfolio or your retirement fund) and then yes, creating rules & heuristics around the type of asset classes that are appropriate for that unique situation. Then as the portfolio ages and your "path" matures (we use a glidepath structure to maintain a volatility cap over the lifetime of the portfolio), the portfolio dynamically adjusts the risk downwards and into a less volatile portfolio that favors capital preservation over accumulation.
All that is done through publicly traded ETFs that represent the asset classes but it's more granular then the way you typed it out. Rather then just being "large cap" it would be "US Large Cap", "ex-US Large Cap", "European Large Cap", "APAC Large Cap", etc. It's not just about risk though, with the most obvious modern example being crypto. Most advisors in 2025 are saying 2.5-5% of a portfolio can go into the asset class but does that make sense if you're investing for a down payment on a house in 5 years? You're going to want higher returning assets that are less volatile like infrastructure equity or private credit (same return profile, less volatile).
The net result is far greater risk adjusted returns and likelihood of actually achieving your financial goals because you've built your overall portfolio piece by piece with the goals as the building blocks.
Thanks!
The platform isn't clear, as I visited the platform. Only the FAQ provides adequate information about your platform, which isn't enough.
You must convey and deliver you you are, and why we should consider you in first place. You can write as:- A safe wealth management and optimization space, custom tailored on geographics, demographics, income, areas of expertise....., controlled and utilized by yourself, in guidance from experienced professionals and custom solution or something similar.
And if you're successful with conveying, let that to be tested by alpha or beta users, give the beta access to the HN community or targeted users so that they can feel the difference. You've mentioned the alpha results, but if I haven't seen or someone haven't seen and have access, we can't provide specific POV on core product and features.
The website says “$8.50/month” and “$99 billed annually” for Pro Annual. Those numbers are inconsistent. $99 annually is $8.25/month. Usually, one would expect a wealth management service to be able to divide 99 by 12 correctly. Failing to do this is not very encouraging.
Monthly doesn't make sense either. Is it monthly or is it quarterly? $10/month > $29 quarterly.
Whether it's legit or not, it's seeming like a lot of Show HN posts that make the front page are giving vibes of "Ah, another AI generated tailwind/Stripe template that collects emails and was slapped together in an hour". They have SEC registration but don't have literally any information on their about us for a company I'd need to be able to trust
Very fair comments, platform was not slapped together with AI. Landing redesign, was. We're in the process of putting a more robust about us page now with more details about us and the company.
It read to me as a (very) small discount for choosing to be billed annually vs. monthly.
The discount is applied to $10/month and is said to make it effectively $8.5 per month, but is actually $8.25 per month, since they claim to charge $99 per year.
Yeah, it's a $20 discount billed annually.
Then that would be $100 per year and none of your numbers for annual plans are accurate. Your website claims $99 per year and claims that is equivalent to $8.50 per month. None of these 3 numbers are equivalent.
You're correct! I made the fix.
So I entered my email in "request access". You proceed to send me an email with no information on how to get access? But I must and I quote "Reply with 'YES' + your favorite ice-cream flavor within 48 hours to lock your spot" - and this is regards to "VIP Founder's Circle". What's is this? How am I supposed to take you seriously? And yet these email provides zero information on how to actually get access to your application. Why would I want your "VIP Spot" which I apparently "claimed" if I can't even create an account to see what you offer?
The product is in early days and in a closed alpha right now. We're looking for test users that are willing to work with us and provide feedback as we squash bugs and build out the platform out of it's infancy.
What you just described is the whole point. If you just responded to that email, one of the co-founders would reach out directly with a question or two and next steps.
We know we are dealing with a touchy but all important subject of managing people's wealth/investments, so it would be irresponsible to allow open account creation and access to investment recommendations without doing our due diligence as founders at this stage.
You might not like the approach (totally fair), but it's brought us incredibly engaged and enthusiastic initial users who's feedback is directly going back into the app in a quick iterative loop.
Was this platform built by vibe coding?
Just the landing page according to their other comment, but the basic errors in pricing don’t inspire confidence in the rest of their system…
To be fair though, their answers to some other questions here seemed thorough, but I don’t know much about finance so for all I know those are just AI slop lol.
No, it wasn't.