In the past the traditional brokerages charged fees.

On the bright side, Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab and M1 Finance do not currently charge fees. In fact, the SEC fined Betterment last year as wash sales occurred in at least 31 percent of accounts enrolled in WealthfrontвЂ™s tax loss harvesting strategy. I have not seen any published data wrt what is the quantum of benefit these firms have provided with tax loss harvesting to justify the fees.

One might argue that the fee is justified based on their claim of Tax loss harvesting. For this reason, I have excluded Betterment and Wealthfront. Every dollar you donвЂ™t pay in fees is another dollar in your pocket, compounding for your future. As your balance grows, this becomes a larger and larger recurring annual expense. Initially when your balance is small you might not notice it. Wealthfront and Betterment charge 0.25% to 0.40% fee on all accounts.Д¬harging a fee based on your total assets is egregious. Fees could have been justified back in the day when you needed a human to answer the phone or manually place a trade. In this day and age when almost anything can be done online it is criminal to charge fees for the act of investing. Let us examine each aspect of my perfect investment platform in detail. Would be great if it also did tax loss harvesting. It should also automate investing and re-balance my portfolio automatically back to the desired asset allocation with zero tax implications. In addition to these basic characteristics, it should help one get started with a basic asset allocation.

My ideal dream platform would have zero fees, wide selection of low expense ratio funds and very low minimum investment. 8.1 Share this post: Characteristics Of My Perfect Investment Platform

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