Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Andy Rachleff no published score: no usable exchanges on raw tape, and a fair score needs 8+ · coarse estimate ≈4.5/5 from 4 produced feed exchanges record → ← everyone
Every exchange below was scored with names hidden, four dimensions each from 1 to 5.
An exchange's score is 0.30·directness + 0.30·coherence + 0.25·precision + 0.15·compression.
The published score averages the raw tape exchange scores and shrinks small samples toward the
cohort mean, so five great answers can't beat twenty good ones. Produced feed rows count only
toward coarse estimates, never toward a full score.
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 5 5.00
Q okay, if Clinton gets elected, potentially some of these taxes are going to go up. So one of the things people are saying now is, you know, from a taxless harvesting perspective on equities or securities, maybe what you do is you let go of your losers now, take the loss now. That's one of the things that, am I getting it right, that Wealthfront can kind of do automatically?
A Yeah, and we do it daily. So this is a service, a kind of service that's been offered to the very wealthy for many years, for decades. As a matter of fact, Mitt Romney took advantage of this to pay really low taxes. This was a big issue in the last presidential election, but it's never been possible for the average retail investor to access this kind of capability because traditional advisors can only do it at year end. It just takes too much time. The beauty of software is software works 24 seven, so we can look for these losses daily. And if you do tax loss harvesting just at year end, according to our research, that can add about .6% to your annual after tax return.
AI assessment note: “Yeah, and we do it daily.”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q it. Okay, good. So venture capital firm. So hey, first question I got to ask you, um, it's rare that you see kind of CEOs or sorry, investors, especially someone with your kind of background jump from the VC side to the entrepreneurship side. Typically you see like a Phil Lippin route. They go from Evernote to inside a firm. Why'd you make the decision to jump into your investment?
A Probably because I'm not very bright. Actually, I had retired from the venture capital business to give back. That's why I went on the faculty of my grad school alma mater. I became a trustee of my undergrad school alma mater, and as you read, I'm soon to be the chairman of Penn's endowment committee. Penn is, I think, the seventh largest endowment in the country, and one day I was sitting in an endowment meeting, and the management team was talking about how they generate the great returns that they did, and I thought, Uh, I, I could actually do a social good by using software to deliver what the premier university endowments did for the masses, thereby democratizing access to sophisticated investing. So the idea found me, I was not looking to start a company.
AI assessment note: “So the idea found me, I was not looking to start a company.”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Okay. And where does that kind of place you in terms of other, I kind of guess, vehicles where people are putting their money?
A Well, uh, to give you some context, I think that, uh, Vanguard manages four trillion dollars and Charles Schwab manages something like 2.5 trillion dollars. So that's a tiny drop in the bucket relative to these behemoths. And I think that retail investors have more than 20 trillion dollars under management. As a venture capitalist, what I used to focus on was rate of change, not absolute numbers. That what you find is that with every new technology that succeeds, it gets adopted at a faster rate. So think about the rate at which the telephone was adopted and then radio and television and cellular telephony and the internet. Each new major technology that gets adopted tends to get adopted at a faster rate and grows into a bigger market. And if you drill down on just an individual market, you find the same thing. So for example, ETFs were adopted at a faster rate than index funds, and they just now crossed over index funds in terms of having more assets under management. Automated investment services have grown, have been adopted at a faster rate than ETFs. So that gives me faith that ultimately automated investment services are actually going to manage more assets than even ETFs.
AI assessment note: “So that's a tiny drop in the bucket relative to these behemoths.”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q And if I understood you correctly, you're taking a quarter or you said you're taking a quarter of a percent of total funds that I would put into Wealthfront. Is that right? Annually?
A Well, actually we manage the first 10,000 on your behalf for free, and then we only charge a quarter of a percent on the amount we manage in excess of 10,000 dollars. And we modeled our business model on that of Dropbox. So just as Dropbox would give you a certain amount managed or stored for free, and then if you invited your friends, you and your friends each got an additional 250 meg, At Wealthfront, we manage the first 10 K for free, and for every one that you invite, you and your friends each get an additional five K managed for free. So it's a viral, uh, con, it's the first time a virality has been applied to the investment world.
AI assessment note: “we manage the first 10,000 on your behalf for free, and then we only charge”
