But apparently now US robo-advisors are misbehaving: https://www.wired.com/story/beware-robo ... etterment/
Instead of putting investors solely into a low-cost indexing strategy, Wealthfront has now decided to invest 20% of its investors’ funds into an internal “risk parity” fund, which in turn is invested mostly in complex derivatives known as total return swaps. The fees associated with the old strategy averaged out at 0.09%; the new strategy, by contrast, carries a fixed fee of 0.50%, all of which goes directly to Wealthfront
This is disappointing for this nascent industry and I think it really reinforces the need to actively watch what our investments are doing(check the regular reports).What’s more, despite the fact that the new fund has an active trading strategy that racks up a lot of taxable gains, Wealthfront is only using it in its taxable accounts. That’s almost certainly because of federal regulations barring exactly this kind of self-dealing in tax-exempt accounts.
But yeah, even with that skeeziness they're still way cheaper than the japanese robo-advisers which seem like highway robbery...