Robo-Advisory

A Closer Look at the Engine Room

As index providers, we cherish rules-based, transparent, quantitative approaches more than anything, and we’ve applied these methods to an index perspective on robo-advisors. Like robo-advisors, we operate on the passive investing side, develop multi-asset strate-gies and work with portfolio optimization models. In this paper, we try to help answer some of the questions associated with robo-advisors, mainly related to transparency, historical performance, and asset allocation by studying a sample of robo-advisors from the United States and Germany.

Leveraging our core expertise in indexing, this report aims to present a practical analysis as-sessing robo-advisors’ portfolios for specific investor types with different risk profiles.

A Closer Look at the Engine Room Through Time

The new publication is a follow-up to the previous Robo Advisory: A Closer Look at the Engine Room released in November, studying the digital portfolios of three hypothetical investors – Bart S., Lisa S., Abraham S. – as recommended by a sample of German and US robo-advisors. After more than six months of investigation, this report presents the key findings on how our three friends’ portfolios have changed over time.