Читать книгу Digital Wealth - Moore Simon - Страница 9

Fortunately, just as the landscape for retirement support has changed, so innovation has enabled employees to get a better deal. Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are a critical ingredient here. Unlike mutual funds, which have cost and tax inefficiencies, ETFs often provide the building blocks to assemble a robust portfolio at low cost. In conjunction, algorithmic advice can scale practically infinitely using technology. This provides portfolio management techniques that previously were the reserve of secretive quantitative teams to be publicly available. This means both the instruments and the techniques to ensure a successful retirement are now broadly available. The benefit here is not in lowering the costs of an existing service, but in expanding the reach of that service. Previously, even with relatively high fees, it simply wasn’t economical for a financial advisor to serve a client with less than half a million in assets. The percentage of assets to make it worth the advisor’s time would eat into the client’s investment returns and provide only a meager return for the advisor. This meant that prior to digital investment services, most of America was in the painful position of not necessarily wanting to manage their own investment portfolios, but often having to do so because there were few other viable choices open to them.