| Account Minimum | $500 |
|---|---|
| Fees | 0.24% AUM |
| Goal Setting | Yes, it’s customizable |
| Available Assets | ETFs |
| Interest Paid on Money Balances | N/A |
| Customizable Portfolio | Yes, you may add ETFs or substitute Core for Featured portfolios |
| View Portfolio Before Funding | Yes, but you could arrange an account with a Social Security number |
| Customer Service | Phone and email |
| Financial Advisor Available | No |
| Money Management | No, only through Axos Bank |
| Tax-Loss Harvesting | Yes |
| External Account Sync/Consolidation | Not utilized in portfolio setup or management |
| Mobile App | Yes |
Account Setup
Your first step is to create an account and answer several financial goal and risk tolerance questions. But there’s a catch. Creating an account requires you to input your name, email address, date of birth, phone number, and Social Security number. This can be a barrier for many who prefer to take the initial financial goals and risk questionnaire to view the advisable portfolio without divulging their Social Security number.
Once your account is ready up, you’re in a position to complete the temporary financial goals and risk level questionnaire before funding your account. The questionnaire is analogous to most robo-advisory initial questionnaires and includes selecting a goal equivalent to an emergency fund, retirement, constructing wealth, and a latest home. Through the questionnaire, you’ll provide income, net value, investment horizon, and risk tolerance levels. At the top of the method, a advisable core portfolio is generated based in your questionnaire responses.
Axos Managed Portfolios means that you can open any of the commonly used account types, including:
- Individual and joint taxable accounts
- Roth and traditional individual retirement accounts (IRAs)
Those searching for trust, custodial, or other specific account types might want to select one other robo-advisor.
To fund the account, you just link banking information for transfers. You’re in a position to rename and add additional goals as well. And if you could have general questions, you may reach out to customer support.
Goal Planning
Axos Managed Portfolios signup process enables various goals: an emergency fund, retirement, constructing wealth, a latest home, and more. Once the account is ready up, you may add additional goals and rename any goal inside your account. Investors can view their goal progress from the dashboard, see a goal summary, and discover the worth and performance of their individual goals.
The goal projection scenario tool provides expected, best-, and worst-case returns for the prevailing goal. You may as well test out different scenarios by setting a goal deposit amount and frequency to view how your goal progress will change. The goal summary and projection tools give users an excellent idea about how likely they’re to fulfill their financial aspirations and offer occasional nudges toward those goals.
Account Services
The Axos Managed Portfolios are solely a digital investment platform. Users can arrange automatic deposits into their accounts and there aren’t any fees for withdrawals out of your account.
Axos is a full-service online financial firm that provides self-directed trading and managed portfolios via Axos Invest. Axos began as a bank and thru Axos Bank they provide typical banking services and products equivalent to checking, savings, and lending. Managed Portfolio investors might want to use Axos Bank or one other firm for lending and money management services individually as these will not be contained inside the robo-advisory offering.
Money Management
Axos Managed Portfolios are fully invested within the financial markets. Unlike several other platforms, the portfolios don’t include money allocations. Users who want checking, debit cards, and more money management is not going to find this inside Axos Managed Portfolios. They’ll easily arrange money accounts at Axos Bank. On the positive side, the dearth of a money portion to the portfolio removes a performance drag that another robo-advisors with a high money allocation suffer from during advancing markets.
Portfolio Construction
The initial portfolio construction follows the standard modern portfolio theory (MPT) robo-advisory path with risk-tolerance levels starting from conservative to aggressive and portfolios populated with diversified ETFs to match. Conservative portfolios will allocate more cash to fixed assets while aggressive-leaning selections will allocate more to stock ETFs.
To view alternate portfolios, users can retake the initial questionnaire. Each risk-related portfolio includes a combination of stock, bond, and real estate ETFs with distinct return projections. The customization options described below add socially responsible and investment theme options.
Portfolio Customization
Axos is probably the most customizable robo-advisors available on the market today. Users who don’t want to take a position within the advisable core portfolios can replace them with a method or style-related selection from the Portfolio Plus decisions.
Each featured portfolio option has a cute name and represents a selected group of ETFs with an overriding theme. Users can delve into their account and the featured section to view the portfolio details. This section is difficult to search out on the web site and requires some digging to get the suitable screen. This can be a disservice to the platform, because it’s an incredibly useful feature that can be attractive to investors on the lookout for some customization of their automated portfolio.
Axos Managed Portfolios offers a second customization option on top of the thematic portfolios. Investors can select as much as 20 style or strategy ETFs from greater than 30 available decisions so as to add to an existing portfolio. The ETFs range from typical diversified U.S. and international stock and bond ETFs to unique sector picks. After users select their ETFs, they’ll set a preferred asset allocation.
| Available Assets | |
|---|---|
| Individual Stocks | N/A |
| Mutual Funds | N/A |
| Fixed Income | ETFs |
| REITs | Yes (ETFs) |
| Socially Responsible or ESG Options | Yes, through customization options |
| ETFs | Yes |
| Non-Proprietary ETFs | Yes |
| Mutual Funds | N/A |
| Private Equity | N/A |
| Crypto, Forex | N/A |
Portfolio Management
Axos Managed Portfolios includes the standard rebalancing of the person funds back to your chosen asset allocation when values deviate 5% or more from the goal allocation. Core and customised holdings are all rebalanced in keeping with chosen asset weights. Those with taxable accounts also can go for tax-loss harvesting that may swap out similar ETFs to lower the general tax liabilities when there are unrealized losses in your portfolio.
The useful return graph illustrates average, worst-, and best-case scenario returns. In case your portfolio is aggressively invested and you may’t stomach the hypothetical worst-case scenario, it is advisable to revert to a more conservative asset allocation.
Customers can link their external financial accounts to the dashboard. The account management only includes assets inside the Axos Managed Portfolio account.
The platform enables users to customize their dashboard with tile views of useful data. The eight tiles include account overview, distribution, trends, recent transactions, move money, scheduled payments, invest goals (for tracking as much as two goals), and investment overview. The tracking information is basic and lacks the complexity of Personal Capital, Wealthfront, or SigFig’s investment management tools.
| Key Portfolio Management Features | |
|---|---|
| Automatic Rebalancing | When values deviate 5% from goal |
| Reporting Features | Statements and tax documents available online |
| Tax-Loss Harvesting | Yes, you may exclude ETFs to avoid wash sale rules |
| External Account Syncing/Consolidation | Yes, you may sync external accounts but they aren’t utilized in portfolio management or creation |
User Experience
Desktop Experience
In case you want an intuitive user experience, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Although all the knowledge you wish is offered, finding statements, customization options, and extra features is cumbersome and might be in comparison with a game of hide and seek. This can be a shame because the customizations are considered one of the important thing strengths of Axos Managed Portfolios.
Mobile App Experience
Many users report a negative experience, with some saying it has gone downhill since WiseBanyan was acquired by Axos. The Axos Invest Managed Portfolios app has just 1.8 stars from over 500 reviews on Google Play. If mobile experience may be very vital to you, you might want to contemplate one other robo-advisor.
Customer Service
Customer support is a area of expertise for Axos Managed Portfolios. With live phone customer support during normal business hours and email options, we were very satisfied with this aspect of the platform. In our testing, emails were answered inside at some point. The phone representatives are helpful and respond quickly. Text and email alerts might be customized to tell users of statement and tax form availability. The FAQs are adequate but lack the depth of other platforms and a search feature to search out information quickly.
Security
As can be expected from a bank-based robo-advisor, Axos Managed Portfolios offers premier-level safety features, fraud protection, customer education, and more.
Investors’ assets are protected by the usual SIPC insurance of $500,000, including $250,000 in claims for money. This protects consumers against corporate fraud or malfeasance in addition to failures and bankruptcies and never losses resulting from normal market fluctuations.
Security measures include:
- State-of-the-art technology to detect and forestall cybercrime
- Secure socket layer encryption
- Automatic logout after a brief time period
- Account fraud monitoring
- Two-factor authentication
Education
Don’t enroll for Axos Managed Portfolio expecting investment education. The location’s blog doesn’t have many investment-related articles. The Tools and Calculators section is nice for banking and lending but has just one investing-related calculator for retirement planning. There are currently no videos or webinars.
Commissions and Fees
Axos Invest charges 0.24% of assets under management for all accounts, deducted monthly out of your account balance. That is just under the 0.25% charged by competitors Betterment and Wealthfront and consistent with a typical robo-advisor. The core portfolios levy a median 0.12% expense ratio, which is kind of low. The fund expense ratio is paid to the ETF management firm, to not Axos.
There’s a $500 minimum to open an account. Should your account fall below that quantity resulting from market activity or withdrawals you will be charged $1 a month as a substitute of 0.24%.
In line with a source at the corporate, there aren’t any taxable brokerage account closure fees and Axos charges you $40 to liquidate an IRA. Account transfers to a different firm are charged a $75 fee.
| Category | Fee |
|---|---|
| Management fees for $5,000 account | $12 |
| Management fees for $25,000 account | $60 |
| Management fees for $100,000 account | $240 |
| Termination fees | Taxable brokerage: $0 IRA: $50 |
| Expense ratios | 0.12% for core accounts |
Final Verdict
Axos Managed Portfolios is an excellent selection for any investor who wants to regulate portions of their investment portfolio and receive automated portfolio management at a low fee together with tax-loss harvesting. Axos Bank customers will appreciate having all of their financial assets under one roof. One thing holding Axos’s solid robo-advisor offering back is the user experience and navigation that makes a few of its best features difficult to search out.
Ultimately, when you learn the way to navigate the web site, Axos Managed Portfolios is an excellent product and the shopper service options are a standout feature. With a streamlined user experience and clearer paths to its strong customization features, it might be even higher.
The whole lot You Must Know About Robo-Advisor
Methodology
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