MarketRiders Review – A Digital Portfolio Advisor

About MarketRiders

MarketRiders is a long-term investment platform designed to help professionals manage their money for retirement. Essentially, MarketRiders acts like an automated investment advisor, offering portfolio options based on investors’ willingness to take on risk and desired rate of return. The advantages to using MarketRiders is that it focuses on ETFs rather than mutual funds to keep commissions and fees as low as possible. Overall, the platform is largely geared towards people with little investment knowledge who are thinking about retirement. Investors with basic financial knowledge could accomplish much of the same portfolio diversification on their own using the tools provided with most IRA and 401(k) brokerage accounts.

Pricing Options

MarketRiders costs $14.95 per month or $149.95 per year for access to the platform.

MarketRiders Features

Portfolio Design

The first thing that you do when starting out with MarketRiders is to fill out a basic questionnaire about their risk tolerance and investing goals. From this, the automated MarketRiders algorithm suggests a basic way to slice up your portfolio into different investment types.

Once the diversification strategy is set, MarketRiders will automatically generate a list of stocks, bonds, ETFs, and other assets for you, complete with the amounts that should be invested in each asset. You can choose your broker, which allows MarketRiders to find commission-free ETFs – the total cost of the portfolio in commissions is displayed at the bottom of the asset list. MarketRiders can make recommendations at Schwab, SogoTrade, TD Ameritrade, Fidelity and Vanguard.

Note that more advanced investors can also customize the diversification of their portfolios. In this case, MarketRiders will create a basic portfolio for you, and then you can manually change the percentage of your portfolio that you would like to dedicate to different asset classes. When done, you’ll receive an updated list of suggested assets and the amounts of each to purchase.

Note that MarketRiders does not integrate with any brokerage, so you’ll need to purchase the suggested bonds, ETFs, and stocks directly from your broker.

Investment Management

Once you create a portfolio within MarketRiders, the platform offers some relatively basic tools for managing it. If you want to add or withdraw money to or from your portfolio, MarketRiders’ calculators will let you know how to do so without disrupting the balance of your diversification. Alternatively, if your appetite for risk or investment goals change, MarketRiders will help you re-balance your investments to reflect those changes.

Note that since MarketRiders is automatically tracking your portfolio, the software will alert you in the event that your portfolio becomes significantly unbalanced from the target diversification. This could happen because of high growth by one asset class of your portfolio and underperformance by another asset class. You can customize whether MarketRiders should alert you about rebalancing when your portfolio is only slightly or highly out of balance.

Of course, you also have the option to set up multiple portfolios with different goals. Each of these portfolios is managed individually, and MarketRiders does not make suggestions about the best way to use or balance your money across multiple portfolios.

Performance Monitoring

Finally, you have the option to monitor the performance of your portfolio within MarketRiders. More experienced traders will recognize that nearly all of the performance charting within MarketRiders is available from either a broker or attainable with a simple Excel spreadsheet. However, the charts in MarketRiders are convenient in that they can be broken down into asset classes rather than just individual holdings.

Customization and Layout

MarketRiders makes navigating your account extremely simple. All of your portfolios are displayed in a single dashboard, and you’ll find options to further explore or make changes to each portfolio directly under the prominent diversification pie charts. Pages for tracking performance, asset allocation, and your investment goals are prominently displayed and have very clean organizational structures. Portfolio performance can only be viewed one portfolio at a time, although this is not an issue for most investors.

MarketRiders Platform Differentiators

In reality, there is very little that MarketRiders can do that a medium-tier or higher brokerage cannot do. While the automated portfolio builder for creating a diversified portfolio based primarily on ETFs is useful, most brokerages include some similar form of this tool with an IRA or 401(k) account. Furthermore, since MarketRiders is not a brokerage, investors will need to go through their brokers to actually purchase the recommended portfolio in any case. The main advantage to MarketRiders is that it focuses on keeping commissions and fees to a minimum, although again this can typically be accomplished without help by investors with even a little knowledge of how ETFs and mutual funds work.

Who is MarketRiders Best for?

MarketRiders is targeted towards long-term investors, such as non-investment professionals seeking to build up a retirement fund. While the platform does provide useful tools at a reasonable price, most investors who have some basic knowledge of commissions and fund fees can achieve the same portfolio diversification offered by MarketRiders through their brokerage or a free retirement robo-advisor tool. Therefore, MarketRiders is best for investors who feel highly unconfident with long-term investing and portfolio diversification, but who do not want to use a traditional investment advisor like Motley Fool, Investors Business Daily, or Gorilla Trades.

Pros

• Diversified portfolio based on low-fee ETFs
• Simple portfolio rebalancing tools
• Alerts when portfolio becomes unbalanced
• Performance tracking by asset class
• Simple, understandable layout

Cons

• Most tools can be had for free with an IRA or 401(k) brokerage account
• Not integrated with brokerages to buy and sell portfolio assets (requires manual work)