Two Days in August

The anticipated wide swings in the last two days presented me with the opportunity to compare the two robo advisor’s performance. Later this year, I am going to decide between Betterment and Schwab’s Intelligent Portfolios for some of my IRA funds. So I was quite interested in how they performed over the last two days, and since the first of August.

Unfortunately, I decided to wait until the end of the day to do the analysis. The large gains earlier in the day disappeared. Hopefully sometime tomorrow will give me an opportunity to look at an increasing market. None the less, the S&P 500 index dropped 1.35% today and is down 10.01% this month.

Betterment actually was up 0.23% today and is down 5.78% for the month. There are 11 funds in Betterment and 3 finished up today, enough to make the total positive. These were emerging market funds and the FTSE developed market ETF.

Schwab dropped 0.33% today and is down 7.34% in August. There are 17 funds in this account, 9 had gains today but were more than offset by losses on large cap U.S. funds, REITs, and gold.

It’s interesting that Betterment has outperformed Schwab recently because early on Schwab was the better performer.

I think I’m going to follow these daily for a while (I continue to monitor these weekly). If I update the blog again, I’ll post on Twitter at @billlanke.