There were two more test accounts,
Folio Investing and Lending Club. Folio Investing is a broker dealer with some
unusual characteristics. They offer cheap trades as long as you are willing to
have the trades made during their trading windows, 11 AM and 2 PM. The trades
are cheap if you make a high volume of trades. This will likely happen because
you keep stocks as a group in separate folios and generally trade them as an
entity. They also have many Ready to Go (RTG) folios which are groups of stocks
with a common thread. Since the makeup of these change regularly, this also
increases trades. They do offer an annual fee of $290 which gives you lots of
trades. But this makes it expensive for small accounts.
Folio Investing is fun for those
who like to trade stocks. If I were younger, this would be something that would
intrigue me. But, I’m attempting to put my investments on auto pilot, hence my
interest in robo-advisers. I am going to add funds to this account for the
short term in an effort to get some above average growth. But I’ll pull the
funds out later in the year and close the account.
I included Lending Club as a test
account when in reality it wasn’t. I had opened two small test accounts with
Lending Club and Prosper and chose Lending Club over Prosper. I then opened an
IRA with Lending Club (actually SDIRA) and rolled over $10,000. This is the
account I’ve been reporting on weekly. It’s been successful. I certainly will
keep this account and in fact plan on rolling more money into it.
Well, this concludes the
experiment with the test accounts, and likely the blog. It has been
instructive, interesting, and a lot of work. But I’ve accomplished my
objectives. I hope it’s been useful to at least a few people. Obviously, I will
be tracking the performance of these larger accounts on a weekly basis for
personal reasons. If you have interest in these results, Email me at bill.lanke@gmail.com.
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