You shouldn’t be picking stocks. That’s the one commandment of modern investment advice. Don’t pick stocks, most importantly, don’t pay investment managers who try to outperform the market. When you add up their fees and their nontrivial chance of losing relative to the rest of the market, you’re better off skipping the self-proclaimed experts.
Think of MarketRiders as an automated investment adviser. The site doesn’t manage your money itself. Instead, you keep your funds at a low-cost online broker like Vanguard or Schwab. After you sign up for MarketRiders, you tell it how much you’d like to invest, for what time period, and your risk tolerance. (You can create different portfolios for different purposes, and the site works for both taxable and nontaxable accounts—say, one for your retirement, one for your dream house, one for your kid’s college.) Based on your information, MarketRiders figures out which securities you should buy at your broker. Then it tracks your investments, warns you when they’ve gotten out of balance, and tells you what to buy and what to sell in order to rebalance them.
| yearly fees on account | Betterment | Market Riders | Wealthfront |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10.000$ | 25 - 50$ | account minimum 25k $ | 0$ |
| 25.000$ | 62.5 - 125$ | 149$ | 37.5$ |
| 50.000$ | 125 - 250$ | 149$ | 100$ |
| 100.000$ | 250 - 500$ | 149$ | 225$ |
| 200.000$ | 500 - 1000$ | 149$ | 475$ |