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Robo Adviser Beat:Betterment Claims Better ETF Construct for 401ks

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MarketsMuse curators note that “there is always a better way, until its not better. ..”But that isn’t stopping Betterment LLC, the startup robo-adviser that claims to offer a solution for investors who seek an automated approach to stuff ETFs into their401k portfolios.

Betterment, a leading robo-adviser, announced last week that it will launch a 401(k) platform for employers starting early next year. Portfolios will be made up of exchange-traded funds.

Jon Stein, Bettterment CEO
Jon Stein, Bettterment CEO

According to Betterment CEO Jon Stein.. “Current 401(k) offerings—and we have examined them all—have poor user experiences, high costs, and a clear lack of advice. Not anymore. Betterment for Business will bring our smarter technology to the workplace and the millions of Americans who badly need it to meet their retirement needs. “It’s time that all Americans have low-cost, unconflicted advice and smarter technology for retirement planning.”

Betterment says it currently has 100,000 retail customers and $2.6 billion in assets under management in its diversified mix of exchange-traded funds.

Fast-growing ETFs remain a tiny part of the 401(k) market. Anne Tergesen at The Wall Street Journal notes that two key benefits of owning ETFs — intraday trading and tax-efficiency — are sound much less exciting in reference to 401(k)s:

“A couple of ETFs’ biggest selling points don’t give them an edge in the 401(k) market. ETFs trade all day long like stocks, but that typically isn’t a feature that employers want to offer in retirement plans. Employers want employees “to take a long-term perspective—not to be day trading,” Ms. Lucas said.  “ETFs are also tax-efficient, but that doesn’t matter in tax-sheltered retirement plans,” said Brooks Herman, head of data and research at BrightScope.”

In offering an ETF-only menu for its 401(k), Betterment joins Charles Schwab Corp. , which last year launched an all-ETF version of its Index Advantage 401(k) platform. Other companies that offer ETFs within 401(k) plans include Vanguard Group and Capital One Financial Corp.’s ShareBuilder 401(k).

For the full story from the WSJ, please click here

ETF News

Should You Have An All-ETF Portfolio? Betterment CEO Has An Answer

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MarketMuse update is courtesy of CNBC. CEO and Founder of Betterment , Jon Stein, offered his commentary on this issue to CNBC. Betterment is an automated investing service that provides optimized investment returns for individual, IRA, Roth IRA & rollover 401(k) accounts.

There’s a natural progression in the way the public responds to innovation. Something that first seems like a mere novelty becomes an interesting new niche, then a great idea and then, “How did we ever get along without this?”

In financial services, exchange-traded funds are somewhere around the third or fourth stage, between new niche and great idea. ETFs attracted more net investment last year ($239 billion) than did mutual funds ($225 billion), according to data from Morningstar. Five years earlier the net inflow into mutual funds was more than triple the net amount invested in ETFs.

In the last five years, the public’s affinity for ETFs raised assets under ETF management by 152 percent, to $2 trillion, up from $793 billion. Mutual fund assets only rose 53 percent during the same period.

Faster and cheaper information system infrastructure has helped the growth of ETFs. In my view, ETF portfolios will be the inevitable default for investors in the years to come because they are lower cost, more transparent and offer greater liquidity and tax advantages than mutual funds. Already, the increasing number of assets invested with automated investing services, which use all-ETF portfolios, underscores this shift.

Lower cost

By passively and systematically tracking an index, ETFs are far cheaper to run than most actively managed mutual funds that employ portfolio managers and analysts to select securities. That research costs money, and so does the frequent trading that’s common in such funds—they call it “active management” for a reason—not to mention the buying and selling of fund shares themselves, transactions that always involve the fund provider.

More transparent

ETFs also feature greater transparency. Their underlying portfolios change more rarely because the indexes that they’re based on generally maintain stable lists of components. The high turnover of many mutual funds and the fact that their holdings are reported only four times a year can make it difficult for shareholders to know exactly what they’re holding.

It’s not just the specific securities that can keep mutual fund investors in the dark. The broad nature of the fund itself can become obscured by what’s called “style drift.” Say growth is outperforming value; the managers of value funds, consciously or not, may start tilting toward more growth-oriented stocks.

Depending on what else they own, shareholders may become overweight in growth stocks and not even know it. By contrast, a value-stock ETF will hold value stocks no matter what.

ETFs are more transparent in another sense. The very low expenses and commoditized nature of ETFs make commissions and “kickbacks” to brokers or retirement-plan sponsors impractical. So if an ETF is recommended by an advisor or made available by a broker or retirement-plan sponsor, it’s likely to be an unbiased recommendation.

For the complete article from CNBC, click here