UPDATE: I recently learned, first-hand, that you should make sure you follow-up any promo/acct. opening by giving MOTIF a phone call to verify that your account is “coded” for the promotion. When I signed up for MOTIF, there was a promo going and for some reason it didn’t get applied to my account. 6 months later, I called to ask why, and they fixed the glitch and retroactively applied the promo, no questions asked. Great customer service.
Current promo?: If you want to try Motif Blue out (the $4.95/month pricing option) Click Here, and you’ll receive your first 3 months free. Full Disclosure – I don’t have this service, so I get nothing from you signing up for this, but that’s no reason not to take advantage of it as a new customer, if you want this sort of account.
There used to be a promo to sign-up for a regular trading account, but I can no longer find it. Search about the internet and maybe you can!
Greetings boys and girls,
Today I’ll be discussing yet another investment platform, MOTIF. Before you go further, know that MOTIF is a platform much more advanced than the other Robo’s I’ve discussed on this site. This is not to say that it is better; it’s just different. And it’s different in a way that requires you to understand investments at a more advanced level in order to make the best use of. So if you are still very new to all this, either stay away from MOTIF for now, or contact me individually for more instruction.
(Above Image and more information outside this review @: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/011315/how-motif-investments-works-risks-rewards.asp)
As a finance guy, I’m a big fan of making your money make more money for you, and as a millennial, I’m a big fan of the new investment methods. The reason for the former is obvious. The reason for the latter is because, having started our professional lives during the Great Recession and the rapid rise of college costs, many of us have too many monthly bill payments to have vast amounts of money we can tie up in investments right from the start. And even if we did, we simply don’t want to. We’ve been burned by the global economy once, and like our grandparents or great grandparents who lived through the Great Depression, we just don’t entirely trust the global economic machine.
We are the DIY generation (
anyone?). Although the Richest Man in Bablyon tells us that we should put our investments with experts while we become experts in our own trades, many of us simply cannot give in idea that we would be paying someone else to control our money, and with it, our future fortunes. While 
,
, and 
are viable options for early investors like us, they do somewhat limit our control and breadth of investments. As I’ve covered in my reviews, these companies all give you a risk analysis survey and then allocate your money across a set number of funds that THEY choose in a manner consistent with your risk tolerance. If you want more control, then 
may be for you.
So what is MOTIF, you might ask. Well, before I go into the Pro’s and Con’s, let me try to summarize it like this: Motif is a company that allows you to invest in PERSONALLY CREATED MUTUAL FUNDS. Whereas the traditional robo-advisors choose the underlying assets for you, you choose the underlying assets at MOTIF. And where the traditional robo-advisors give you allocation percentages based on your risk model on a sliding scale (that you can control, if you choose), with MOTIF you can assign asset allocation by market cap/equal allocation/or however you decide.
Still with me? Let me get into the Pro’s and Con’s. But before I do, let me be clear: Below, I’ll be focusing on using a MOTIF just like you would a Robo. You don’t have to do it this way,as MOTIF is a full broker, allowing you to invest in individual stocks, IPOs, or MOTIF funds that other people or the company itself has built. The below information focusses soley on something you build yourself
Pro’s:
- Asset Control. Do you not like the choices you have with another Robo? You can individually choose what you want to have in your MOTIF from all across the US Market!
- Tactical Rebalancing. Do you think now is a good time to be in energy but a bad time to be in bonds, even though your risk tolerance model would place you more in bonds? You can individually increase your weight in one asset and decrease your weight in another, without changing any other holdings you have in your MOTIF.
- Fractional Shares. A company like Wealthfront keeps some of your money in cash until you’ve put enough cash in the account to buy another full share. That cash doesn’t earn anything, and with inflation, you actually lose value. With MOTIF, you can buy fractional shares, meaning that every dollar you invest is invested in the market, with no cash drag.
- Invest in Individual Stocks. Obviously, you should diversify in ETFs across the market in order to diversify. But what if you really like a certain stock (like Tesla) and want to hold individual shares of it as well? Just throw it into your MOTIF. Now you can invest 95% of your assets in a diversified way through ETFs, and still own 5% of your wealth in your favorite company (I don’t recommend you put more than 5% into any one equity position).
Con’s:
- Knowledge.As I stated at the start of this article, MOTIF requires a much greater understanding of at least the lingo and risk involved in investing. With MOTIF, you can’t simply dump money into an account and have the service do the rest, as you would elsewhere. You have to actually figure out how to buy and rebalance. Most importantly, you need to know how to appropriately diversify on your own. The trade-off for having more control over your investments is that you have more opportunity to mess up your own money.
- Knowledge! Do you know what a Leveraged fund is? How about a Closed-End fund or an MLP? Do you understand that investing in Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Google, Amazon, and Cisco does not mean your have diversified? Do you get excited about a company’s story and think you can find the next big stock? MOTIF gives you the power to choose your own fate or cause your own disaster. Don’t invest in a company or fund you don’t understand!
- Complexity. MOTIF has a lot more moving parts. You will need to double check everything you are doing when making a MOTIF fund or placing a purchase, because there is typically a good amount going on during the multiple steps needed to place an order. Oh, and…
- YOU NEED TO KEEP TRACK OF YOUR ALLOCATIONS WHEN YOU CREATE A MOTIF. As I discovered, your MOTIF will “float” with market performance. To give you a simple example, let’s say you “build” a MOTIF with 10 ETFs, allocating 10% to each of them. Then you put $1,000 into the MOTIF ($100 in each ETF) and walk away for a year. During this time, let’s say ETF 1 goes up by $50, while ETF 2 goes down by $50 (all others stay the same). When you come back, you will have 15% if your portfolio in ETF 1, and only 5% in ETF 2 because of this rise and fall. AND, if you now go to put more funds into your MOTIF, it will put your money in with these new allocation %s instead of the old ones. So now, when you put another $1,000 dollars in, ETF 1 will get an additional $150, and ETF will only get $50. There is a REBALANCE button, but you’ll have to fix those percentages back to the original on your own before you use it.
- Cost. MOTIF will charge you $9.95 per trade or rebalance on a MOTIF fund. Now that’s a WAY better price than you’d get elsewhere for buying 10 ETFs at once, but for most investors without a lot of cash to invest at once, those fees add up. Whereas services like the other Robo’s have you pay a % based on how much you have in their service (typically ranging from .35% to 0%), MOTIFs standard service costs per trade. This means that if you are investing $1000 all at once, you are paying a full 1% on your fees, or nearly 3 times what you pay with the other guys. MOTIF recently started an alternative pricing scheme called “MOTIF Blue” that charges a monthly fee rather than a per transaction fee, thereby allowing you to use a dollar cost averaging strategy (which I always recommend), but in order to get this to that same 1% fee cost, you need to have $5,940. And if you want to match the .35% annual fee of Betterment you need to have about $16,972 in your MOTIF! So, more control, but more cost.
- No Dividend Reinvesting. I’m a dividend investor, so for me, this was a big one. With Motif, there is no option to have your dividends be reinvested into the MOTIF or the individual position. Any dividend you receive will move into your cash account, where it will earn you nothing until it’s invested.
So, let’s close this out. MOTIF is a viable alternative to the robo-advisor, but at a price-point that is not useful for “Beginner Investors“. And since “Beginner Investors” are the ones that benefit most from Robo’s I’d have to tell this crowd to stay away.Still, at it’s current price-point, Motif could be a very viable option for someone looking to take the step from Beginner to Intermediate DIY investing. So if you are interested and knowledgeable, give it a look, and tell me what you think.
30pinions 