What can be recommended to someone who wants to set up an investment once and then simply have a regular or irregular monthly transfers from the bank account to the investment accountant have it automatically invest, convert between currencies if required, and reinvest dividends and rebalance periodically.
Finpension Invest - works exactly like you described and once you start drawing down your capital, you can set up a withdrawal plan that pays out a fixed amount every month. The main “downside” is cost: a 0.39% annual management fee…
4 Likes
It’s a shame that IBKR don’t tweak their offerings to allow something like this. They already have everything in place: regular investments, re-balancing. They just need to package it up into something automatic.
It seems you either have the choice of DIY and cheap, or automatic with extra costs.
Saxo Auto Invest?
Cheap and pretty simple to set up IMHO.
1 Like
Waiting for VALL in CHF on IBKR.
Setup automatic bank transfer, recurring invest and done, as its accumulating.
For accumulation a one-and-done solution.
2 Likes
Yes, I guess IBKR works if you have single CHF denominated asset that doesn’t distribute.
1 Like
The whole process that you described takes manually maximum 5 minutes a month. Is this automation really worth it to save this time?
4 Likes
It’s almost never about time saving. It’s about psychologically having to deal with your investments all the time. Seeing volatility, maybe hesitating to invest due to crash narratives etc. etc.
It’s no wonder the best performing investment accounts are those which get forgotten about and have auto-reinvestment on etc. (There is afaik actual analysis done on that)
Most people can’t match the actual indexes performances, because of behavioral pitfalls. Automating that gets rid of it mostly.
Really my recommendation for basically everyone would be to automate as much as possible.
6 Likes
Exactly, it is having it become an automatic background process.
One of the most incredible (and somewhat sad) things I saw, was once a woman had died and because she was a loner who was regularly overseas, nobody realised for years. All her bills were paid automatically. Her post was retained and didn’t build up in her post box. Even the neighbour mowed her lawn so there were no signs anything was wrong.
3 Likes
The woman traveled a lot, they said, and kept to herself.
Neighbors said they didn’t know much about the woman, describing her as of German descent.
That checks out 
Sad and very interesting story. Now imagine an auto investment approach as well. And you just focus on living your live and working on your career. Meanwhile the finances are regulating themselves. Pretty good.
I think there are several stories about dead people’s investment accounts that ballooned to insane sizes due to also being frogotten about.
1 Like
This is probably the only real use case for asset management services. If you’re willing to pay more, there’s no better setup for peace of mind. Just set up your portfolio and a standing order from your bank account once, remove the app/web login from your devices, and never look at it again.
even if you croak, your investments can keep spawning more returns until it grows by leap and bounds!
3 Likes
As far as I know, that story refers to an alleged Fidelity study that has neither been proven to actually exist, nor to have never existed at all.
This article sums it best among the ones I’ve been able to find through a quick Qwant search:
https://www.morningstar.com/columns/rekenthaler-report/archives-praise-dead-investors
Edit: apparently, the original story stems from a Bloomberg radio podcast (Masters in Business) in 2014. In said podcast, the story is related as coming from a third person so it’s a case of a man who’s seen a man who’s seen the bear: Forgetful Investors Performed Best - Business Insider
Edit 2: recording of the podcast (Fidelity bout at 58:51) : https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2014-08-30/masters-in-business-james-oshaughnessy-audio
There’s apparently data on a similar topic in the field of psychiatric and psychologic diagnoses by Paul Meehl in the 1950s. He allegedly found that no matter how much information they had, clinical (or intuitive) forecasts couldn’t beat actuarial (or quantitative) ones, despite his initial hypothesis being the opposite (that actuarial forecasts would be a floor above which clinical forecasts would soar). Looks like this would be the paper (not in free access): APA PsycNet
Also, random funny thing, apparently and according to O’Shaughnessy, $TSLA was overvalued in 2014. ^^
1 Like