I've been eyeing up using a service like Betterment or Wealth Simple for a few months but I don't know anyone who has used it.
I wanted to know if anyone here has had experience with it? what your thoughts were and what kind of a risk profile you set it up for?
Basically, "Can you handle a 30% drop and not lose sleep (and certainly not consider liquidating)? 40%? 20%?"
For most investors, 99% VaR, peak-to-trough, and maybe 95% VaR will lead to a more accurate risk tolerance than their self-assessment of risk tolerance (low, medium, etc), desired returns/goal (the cute graph of possible asset trajectories), or tolerance for volatility in an average year. Their failure case is experiencing a big drop and reactively selling, all because they took too much risk. This is also true of investors who work with human advisors (https://www.vanguard.com/pdf/ISGQVAA.pdf pages 4 and 16 - "Behavioral Coaching"). A great roboadvisor should clearly and loudly predict what an awful year (99% and 95% VaR), and an awful multi-year bear market (peak to trough) looks like.