Dan Egan, Director of Behavioral Finance at Betterment, discusses empirical split-test results from Betterment's Tax Impact Preview feature designed to mitigate impulsive investor allocation changes.
Insight
Egan: Telling panicking investors to do nothing is the worst strategy
“So the worst thing you can ever do if somebody's freaking out to say, stop, don't do anything, sit still, et cetera. You have to take that anxiety and that energy and redirect it towards more positive things.”
Insight
Egan: Advisors cannot implement behavioral finance without controlling software interfaces
“They might want to implement some of these insights from behavioral finance, but unless you control the technology, it's very hard for you to do that.”
Insight
Egan: Searching for manager alpha is only worthwhile with millions in assets
“However many hours you spend trying to find the right manager, or trying to find the right strategy and understand what this stuff is doing, is not well spent unless you already have a very, very large asset base. I'm talking in the millions, at least.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Egan: Saving $33 more monthly matches 1% annual manager alpha for averages
“He basically found that for that person, in order to, if that person went with finding out how to, you know, save more or invest more, rather than pick the better manager, they would need to save something like 33 more dollars per month. So, that's the trade-o…”
Disclosure
Egan: Betterment employs human advisors primarily to study and automate their jobs
“In the longer term, to be clear, We are going to keep automating a large part of that. So it is not simply a matter of, oh, we hit some brick wall and we had, you know, we ended up having to use advisors. Every single financial planner or licensed expert on ou…”
Insight
Egan: Many professional investors enjoy investing personal capital as entertainment
“I think that's where a lot of professional investors, they enjoy the doing more than they care about the outcome of it.”