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Stockspot

Good 6.25
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Stockspot Review

  • Well-designed platform and mobile apps
  • Easy to use
  • Low fees
  • Affordable advised investment
  • Range of portfolios with varying return target to risk profile weightings
  • Heavy focus on Australian equities
  • Limited portfolio customisation opportunities

StockSpot, founded in 2013, was Australia’s first Robo-Advisor investment platform. The company was founded by current CEO Chris Brycki, a former portfolio manager with bank UBS. A tech-centric consumer facing investments and finance company, Sydney-based StockSpot’s defined mission is to offer low-fee investment advice to the retail market that eliminates the majority of the traditional bureaucracy and jargon.

Robo-advisors like StockSpot are online platforms which automate the client profiling process that a traditional, human financial advisors perform. Users are taken through a simple, online questionnaire in which they provide details of their personal financial circumstances, investment aims and timeframe and risk appetite and tolerance. Based on their investor profile, they are then matched with a suitably structured investment portfolio built from ETFs.

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As of early 2018, StockSpot has close to 40,000 registered users of its service and to date has raised $3.7 million over three major Seed, Series A and Series B investment rounds. High profile investors include ETFs pioneer Richard Tuckwell, who led the early 2017 Series B investment round, Alium Capital and H2 Ventures, who led the earlier Series A round.

Robo-advisory services are the fastest growing segment of the wealth management industry, with assets under management expected to reach $2.2 trillion internationally by 2020.

Platform

StockSpot’s investment platform is a proprietary piece of technology developed inhouse and with a strong focus on AI. As would be expected from a well-funded Fintech company, the platform is attractively designed, with a focus on simplicity and usability. The main functionalities can be broken down into the initial investor profiling stage, where users provide details of their finances and investment goals and risk profile. This is achieved by taking users through an online questionnaire.

The platform then provides a suggested investment portfolio to fit the user’s investment profile. The breakdown of the portfolio is represented through attractive, easy-to-understand visualisations. Users can then access detailed data on the different components of the portfolio should they wish.

The third primary functionality is the platform’s investment tracking dashboard which allows users to track the performance of their investments.
As well as the main StockSpot website, users are also given access to well-designed mobile apps available in both Android and iOS format.

Portfolio’s are periodically rebalanced by a financial advisor using StockSpot’s markets analysis technology and methodologies as market conditions change, with users notified.

Markets

StockSpot offers five different wider portfolios with a sliding scale of risk profiles, ranging from ‘Conservative’ to ‘Aggressive Growth’. These portfolios balance a ratio between assets assigned growth or defensive qualities. The growth allocation sees its ratio increased for more aggressive portfolios targeting higher returns.

The company’s investment methodology is based on ETFs, which are low-cost tracker funds. ETFs the StockSpot portfolios invest in must meet several fixed criteria to qualify:

  • Fees under 0.25 per cent a year
  • Spreads of no more than 0.25 per cent
  • Daily average trading volumes of at least half-a-million dollars
  • Funds under management of more than $25 million
  • Counterparty risk less than 10 per cent of the ETF’s net asset value

The ETFs that comprise StockSpot’s portfolios can be broken down into 5 asset classes of Australian Shares, Global Shares, Emerging Markets Shares, Bonds and Gold.

These asset classes are also further broken down into themes. For example, Australian shares are categorised as ‘dividend shares’, ‘large companies’, ‘small companies’ and ‘socially responsible shares’. Global shares are broken down into ‘US shares’, ‘non-US shares’, ‘European shares’, ‘Japanese shares’, ‘Chinese shares’ and ‘Asian large companies’.

Fees, Deposits and Withdrawals

StockSpot fees are relatively low and no charges are applied to the initial investor profiling stage. Once a user has started an investment portfolio, management fees are applied to the overall portfolio value. Clients investing $10,000 or less take advantage of an initial 6-month period during which no management fees are applied. Following the first 6 months, a monthly management fee of $5.50 is charged to portfolios up to a value of $10,000. Portfolios with a value of between $10,001 and $499,999 are charged a yearly fee of 0.66%. This drops to an annual management charge of 0.528% percent annually for portfolios with a value between $500,000 and $249,999 and 0.396% for portfolios valued at over $2.5 million.

StockSpot does not charge any set-up, deposit, exit or brokerage fees. The only other charges that are applied to invested sums are ETF management charges, which are always a maximum of 0.25% per annum and applied by the ETFs provider and not StockSpot itself.

Help & Support

As an online technology-focused and automated service, the underlying principle is that StockSpot should not have to provide a significant level of in-person customer service. This is one of the ways in which fees are able to be kept so low. However, telephone and email contact details are available should users run into any difficulties or have enquiries.

A very high TrustPilot score suggests that StockSpot does deal with any customer service requirement well when they do occur.

Conclusion

StockSpot is a very high quality, low cost option for retail investors whose portfolio size means paying for a human financial advisor would prove prohibitively expensive. The set range of portfolios and limited customisation means the robo-advisory model is unlikely to suit more experienced investors, other than as one element to a wider portfolio. However, this is not the target market and less experienced investors who wish an effective, advised portfolio management service at a cost that will not eat significantly into returns will find StockSpot to be a perfect fit for their needs.

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Stockspot Reviews by Traders
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Vogue_Italia
90 reviews
Review date 17/06/2018
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
StockSpot is one of the more respectable robo-advisory firms. This broker "rebalances" clients accounts via the opinion of an educated account manager.
StockSpot focuses too heavily on Aussie equities.
RudyardK
122 reviews
Review date 12/06/2018
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
StockSpot is simple to use and aimed at traders who don't have the time or experience to trade.
StockSpot is heavily focused on Australian equities. They also trade automatically for some of their clients accounts.
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