Build Robo Advisor Ellevest Portfolios With ETFs

What are the Robo Advisor Ellevest porfolios?

The Ellevest portfolios are exposed to between 50% stocks and 50% bonds and 100% stocks and 0% bonds. The Ellevest portfolios are low- to high-risk portfolios and can be built with up to 15 ETFs. For the past 10 years, the Ellevest Wealthbuilding Portfolio 8 has returned 11.21 with a standard deviation of 14.79.

The dividend yield is 2.13%. The 30 year return is 9.36%. Last year it returned 12.48%.

Performance of robo-advisor Ellevest portfolios

Here is the return of the Ellevest portfolios when using our timeseries.

How do Ellevest’s portfolios compare to the best portfolios?

Below you can see the returns of the best portfolios that we have benchmarked.

Name	See Portfolio	Year to date	Return in 2020	10 year return	CAGR since 1989 (%)	Draw Down
Premium Portfolio		-12.97	18.29	16.52	11.28	-37.63%
Premium Portfolio		-12.98	18.11	11.03	11.21	-44.87%
Premium Portfolio		-13.6	19.7	14.99	10.85	-32.77%
Premium Portfolio		-8.98	3.19	11.85	10.99	-36.46%
Premium Portfolio		-9.17	3.66	11.87	10.88	-36.35%
Premium Portfolio		-14.04	21.03	16.29	11.25	-37.00%
Premium Portfolio		-9.45	8.7	14.47	11.14	-35.26%
Premium Portfolio		-11.1	7.48	11.45	10.93	-37.91%
Premium Portfolio		-9.97	5.36	13.2	11.81	-35.43%
Premium Portfolio		-8.76	3.42	13.15	10.99	-40.85%

Who is Robo Advisor Ellevest?

Ellevest was founded in 2014. It is a roboadvisor explicitly targeting women.

Ellevest competes with many other robo advisor firms such as Betterment, Wealthfront, and Wealthsimple.

Ellevest is fueled by the sentiment that many women feel intimated by investing. Ellevest tries to use empowering words and pictures to draw women to their platform.

Description of robo-advisor Ellevest portfolios

Morningstar builds the Ellevest portfolios. We have seen from the Morningstar’s portfolios that they love to have many asset classes.

Ellevest uses many portfolio asset classes for its portfolios. Ellevest also has many portfolios. They claim to have over a hundred.

For this reason, we decided only to benchmark a selected portion of Ellevest’s portfolios.

Here’s how we selected the portfolios.

We chose the goal of “wealth-building.” Within that goal, we chose the time frames:

• Five years
• Ten years
• Fifteen years
• Twenty years

Then, within each timeframe, you can select three risk levels

• Conservative
• Standard
• Aggressive

The timeframe tweaks the risk level very slightly.

We thus have 12 portfolios to benchmark (4 timeframes times three risk levels)

We give the portfolios a number ranging from 1 – 12, denoting their risk level. 12 is the portfolio with the most risk.

So portfolio 1 is for a timeframe of 5 years with a conservative level of risk. Portfolios 12 is for a timeframe of 20 years with an aggressive risk level.

Are you confused yet?

It gets even more confusing – hang in there.

Ellevest also has impact portfolios. These are socially responsible investing portfolios (ESG portfolios). They use very particular funds that do not have a long track record. If you want a socially responsible portfolio, we recommend checking our socially responsible investment portfolios that portfolioeinstein.com track.

You don’t need hundreds of portfolios to help your customers.

We are not (yet) tracking Ellevest’s impact portfolios.

Asset class choices

Morningstar, which has built the Ellevest portfolios, uses a lot of asset classes.

• Ellevest use muni bonds when you are close to your target (lower risk)
• They use REITs and junk bonds early on to capture as much return as possible
• They use some very rarely seen asset classes like the high yield municipal bonds (HYD). We use corporate bonds as a proxy for this. They have comparable returns and risk levels.

I was already impressed by the Morningstar portfolios, and Ellevest gives off the same impression.

They come off as being highly asset allocation clever. They use the right tools for the right job.

For all the complexity that the Ellevest portfolios display, some of the portfolios are identical. For example, portfolios 5 and 7 are the same. In Ellevest, these correspond to 10 years till goal on a standard risk level and 15 years till goal on a conservative risk level. The same goes for portfolios 6 and 8. And the same with 8 and 10 and 11 and 9.

Alright, let take a look at the performance.

What is the asset allocation for robo-advisor Ellevest portfolios?

Resources for the robo-advisor Ellevest portfolios

Check out the Ellevest YouTube channel.

Suggestions for your next steps

Finding the correct portfolio is hard. Maintaining your portfolio is also daunting. If you are still in doubt about which portfolio to choose, we suggest you read our article How To Invest Money: 5 Simple Steps That Work For Anyone

If you have already committed to a portfolio – good for you! If you need help maintaining the portfolio you will find our rebalance worksheet useful.

Rebalancing your portfolio lowers your risk and may provide higher returns in the long run. It is completely FREE.

You can find the rebalance worksheet in our article Here Is The Most Easy To Use Portfolio Rebalance Tool.

Rebalancing lowers your portfolio risk and can increase your returns.

If you want access to our high-performing portfolios then you want to take a look at the premium portfolios. This is a paid product that gives you the 20 best-performing portfolios since 1989. The portfolios represent a great opportunity for you to get more money from your investment portfolios. We think it’s a “no-brainer”.

You stand to gain literally thousands more dollars EACH YEAR for the price of a few months of Netflix. (Haven’t you watched enough Netflix?).