The Robo-Adviser Surges Ahead

Looking at the results for the month of March, my robo-adviser fund was clearly better positioned to take advantage of the turnaround in the market.  It crushed my fancy high-falutin' fee based investment adviser.  They're huddled up in a corner crying into their Brooks Brothers pocket squares.

So for the month of March, the robo-adviser increased 7.08%.  By comparison, my full service adviser managed to post a 3.89% gain.

Now I'm going to provide one minor caveat to this.  As I've mentioned before, my full service adviser has be in some hedge funds.  The valuation in those hedge funds posts one month in arrears, so the March numbers for my full service adviser represents the hedge fund values as of February 28, 2016, rather than as of March 31.  So to the extent those hedge funds recovered in value in March, it's not reflected in these numbers but will catch up in April.  So we'll see how that plays out.

For the quarter, it was still a relatively severe beating, but not quite as bad.  The robo-adviser finished up 0.56% on the quarter, and the full service adviser ended up down 1.63%.

I'll be watching April very carefully because of the aforementioned hedge fund recovery issue.