Master the mechanics of wealth building.
Deep dives into specific asset classes, market sectors, and wealth-building strategies to refine your investment thesis.
A robo-advisor can sell an investment at a loss, replace it with a similar fund, and keep your portfolio on target. That is the clean version of automated…
Nathaniel Prescott·15 min read
A $3 monthly fee sounds harmless until you apply it to a $100 portfolio. Then it becomes a 36% annual management cost.
Nathaniel Prescott·15 min read
Vanguard Digital Advisor charges a net annual advisory fee of approximately 0.15% for its all-index portfolios. That is roughly $15 to $16 per year for every…
Nathaniel Prescott·16 min read
Every Schwab Intelligent Portfolios client holds cash they did not personally select as a portfolio allocation. Depending on the risk profile, roughly 6% to…
Nathaniel Prescott·19 min read
The robo-advisor market tends to describe product updates as revolutions. In practice, most are changes to the machinery behind the interface: a different way…
Nathaniel Prescott·20 min read
Fourteen million users. Thirty billion dollars in assets under management. An average account balance of $2,142.
Nathaniel Prescott·9 min read
Here’s the contradiction that should keep you skeptical.
Nathaniel Prescott·13 min read
Seventy to ninety percent of retail day traders lose money. The average active trader trails the market by roughly 6.5% per year. Meanwhile, the average…
Nathaniel Prescott·13 min read
A 1.00% annual fee can turn a hypothetical $100,000 portfolio growing at 4% for 20 years into roughly $179,000. At 0.25%, that same portfolio ends near…
Nathaniel Prescott·13 min read
Zero-commission trading cut the visible price of a stock trade from $5 or $10 to $0. That was a real improvement. It also created a dangerous accounting error…
Nathaniel Prescott·13 min read
The best beginners investing app should reduce the number of decisions you make, not manufacture more of them.
Nathaniel Prescott·13 min read
We pulled the fee schedules and threshold data for every major automated investing platform in the US market. The number that kept surfacing was $50,000 — and…
Nathaniel Prescott·12 min read
$10 a month invested at 8% for 30 years becomes roughly $14,700 before fees and taxes. That is not nothing. It is also not retirement, not financial…
Nathaniel Prescott·14 min read
The cash sweep APY inside Robinhood Gold printed near 5% in recent quarters. Two months earlier it sat close to 4%. The exact figure at any given moment is…
Nathaniel Prescott·8 min read
A wash sale is not a theoretical tax footnote. It is a 61-day trap: 30 days before the sale, the sale date, and 30 days after. Sell a security at a loss, buy a…
Nathaniel Prescott·15 min read
0.15%. That is what Vanguard charges for Digital Advisor, the firm's flagship robo-advisor service. On a $50,000 portfolio, the annual fee is $75 — a rounding…
Nathaniel Prescott·8 min read
0.25% sounds like a rounding error. On a $250,000 IRA, it is $625 a year. On $500,000, it is $1,250. On $1 million, $2,500. Run that $625 forward for 30 years…
Nathaniel Prescott·6 min read