Not all roboadvisors are created equally.

Investors driven by the allure of asset allocation and rebalancing services at minimal costs embrace the roboadvisor trend, but the choice of digital advice platform has major implications for their experience, according to a recent study by Martinsville, N.J.-based Condor Capital Management.

“Any single given investor might be better off in one roboadvisor or another, but with the current amount of information out there, it would be difficult for an individual investor to determine which one is best,” says Ken Schapiro, president of Condor Capital Management. “That’s the problem our report is trying to solve.”

Earlier this month, Condor Capital, via its sister firm BackenDBenchmarking, released the fourth edition of “The Robo Report,” a quarterly analysis of the investment returns, portfolio composition and trades offered by leading roboadvisors.

According to the report’s authors, the top performing roboadvisors of the second quarter of 2017 were E*Trade’s hybrid service, where a balanced portfolio in a taxable account returned up to 3.22 percent, and WiseBanyan, where an aggressive portfolio returned up to 3.88 percent.

The worst performing roboadvisors in the second quarter, according to the study, were Wealthfront and Personal Capital, where a balanced portfolio in a taxable account returned as little as 2.13 percent, and Hedgeable, where an aggressive portfolio in an IRA returned 2.71 percent.

The best performers in terms of one-year trailing returns were Schwab, which posted an 11.94 percent return over the past 12 months, and E*Trade’s hyvrid service, which returned 11.92 percent. The worst performers were Acorns, posting a 7.3 percent return, and FutureAdvisor, which posted 8.34 percent returns.

For the report, Condor opens up its own accounts with roboadvisors and tracks the holdings and performance of those accounts. In creating the accounts, Condor’s advisors provide similar answers to the risk tolerance and account opening questionnaires.

“We don’t publicly publish our own performance, but we do show it to clients and prospects on a one-on-one basis,” says Schapiro. “People are putting their money into these roboadvisors and it’s kind of like a black box in that nobody really knew how these tools allocated and how they had performed over time. So two years ago I started opening roboadvisor accounts in hopes of finding out.”

In taxable accounts, the Condor methodology opens up accounts with a moderate, balanced allocation of 60 percent stocks and 40 percent bonds to reflect a standard demand for investors in high tax brackets. In IRAs, Schapiro opens the most aggressive account available, defined as accounts with the highest allocation to stocks. While the baseline allocations are not identical across all study subjects, they’re similar enough to create a basis of comparison.

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