Hey everyone, we’re JJ and Mark from Double (<a href="https://double.finance">https://double.finance</a>). Over the past few months we’ve been working on an investing app that lets anyone design and invest in their own stock index.<p>Start by picking one or more strategies. You can find 20+ starting points in Double that vary from direct index versions of classic ETFs (like SPY) to strategies focused on specific industries, market trends, or themes (like YC public companies). You can also easily build your own grouping of stocks, and tilt your strategy towards or away from certain stocks or sectors.<p>Once you’ve chosen your portfolio, we run a daily portfolio optimization to determine what trades to make, which considers taxes, trading costs, drift and holding costs[1]. If your account is sufficiently diversified, we enable Tax Loss Harvesting as well to capture losses that can help offset capital gains[2]. Finally you can move between strategies either all at once or over time[3].<p>JJ started work on this after selling his last company, making some money, and growing really frustrated at the quality of the portfolio tools available to retail investors. Financial advisors have tools for direct indexing, tax loss harvesting and dollar cost averaging, but they generally charge upwards of 1% a year in AUM fees. Things like Parametric[4] and Canvas[5] have succeeded, but are only accessible through advisors. We wanted to build these kinda advanced portfolio tools for ourselves without any AUM fees.<p>Some common use cases we’ve found are diversifying away from a large RSU position or migrating between risk on and risk off strategies over time. You can also easily allocate a percent of your portfolio to specific baskets of stocks.<p>Let us know what you think! Feel free to email us at founders@double.finance as well<p>[1] More info about our optimizer here <a href="https://help.double.finance/en/articles/9718142-portfolio-optimization">https://help.double.finance/en/articles/9718142-portfolio-op...</a><p>[2] More info about out direct indexing tax loss harvesting here <a href="https://help.double.finance/en/articles/9718959-direct-indexing-tax-loss-harvesting">https://help.double.finance/en/articles/9718959-direct-index...</a><p>[3] More info about out dollar cost averaging here <a href="https://help.double.finance/en/articles/9718389-dollar-cost-averaging">https://help.double.finance/en/articles/9718389-dollar-cost-...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.parametricportfolio.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.parametricportfolio.com/</a><p>[5] <a href="https://canvas.osam.com/" rel="nofollow">https://canvas.osam.com/</a>
This is cool. There is a lot of hesitation to move significant assets from my Charles Schwab brokerage account. That's going to be my main hurdle. I need to understand the safety, trust, trading mechanics, flexibility that I have with Charles Schwab, all of those things become very valuable when talking about high amounts for retirement purposes. I don't really know what you can do there to attract such clients? Will anyone move $5m from their top tier brokerage to Double yet?
Very basic, maybe stupid question: If you're <i>not</i> changing your portfolio strategy or altering your weights, does this work by rebalancing your investment every so often, so that the % of total dollars you hold in an index continues to match the weights you set?<p>Like if a customer creates an index that's 50% AMD and 50% NVDA, and you put $100 in that index, does the customer have some underlying account that initially apportions $50 to each, and then if the next day their NVDA is worth $52 and their AMD is worth $48, the system will sell $2 worth of NVDA and buy $2 worth of AMD?<p>And if that's so, can you set target thresholds for when you want it to rebalance? Like, not until one stock deviates more than 10% from its ideal weight?
In the feature comparison table, I find it deceptive or at least a dark pattern to mark the competitors with a simple check and yourself with a big green check when a feature is present.
A product that I've wanted for a long time is "broad market index fund , minus the individual stocks I am overweight in due to current or previous employment equity" (e.g. VTSAX - MSFT, GOOG/GOOGL), any chance you can handle this today/build it out in the near future? Sounds like you might be able to handle this already?
I'm JJ's brother and an investor in Double so I'm a little bit biased but I believe reducing/eliminating AUM fees is a huge net positive for the world. The performance drag over long term that money managers charge is a tax on people's retirement savings. What Vanguard/Bogle did with Index funds was massive, and I think Double can be this generation's Vanguard. Professional and powerful money management tools with rock bottom/no AUM fees is a massive opportunity. Congratulations on the launch JJ and Mark!
SV money and banking relationships don't prevent a total meltdown, as seen in the Andreessen Horowitz-backed Synapse saga with Evolve.<p>Assume there's just a 0.1% of a meltdown and you're better off sticking to Vanguard ETFs.<p><a href="https://archive.is/G3cYF" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/G3cYF</a>
This is great, exactly what I was looking for, but how do I know I can trust you? I'm a bit hesitant to wire large amounts of money to a startup.<p>Also, how do you make money?
Several years ago, I worked at a company called Motif Investing that was conceptually similar this. It was marketed more as a "build your own ETF" kind of thing. You could assemble and weight up to 30 stocks in a "Motif" and manage it over time. We had some of the features you mention as well. I was happy with the product and enjoyed working their, but the business never really took off. I wish you the best in developing your company!
Is there any resources on how one should go about doing this “make your own index fund” manually?
I live in the EU, and of course, I cannot just use this tool. I’m happy to have a passive tool that tracks my portfolio and spits out the instructions to me for example: “sell 10 AAPL and buy 4 AMD to balance your portfolio”.
I’m more looking for education around operating such a fund, when to rebalance, when to make a stop loss limit etc.<p>Of course, my money I cannot live without is in High yield savings account and Vanguard ETFs. I will only play with ^ ideas with the money I gamble on stock picking.
If you would trading daily and randomly, trading cost alone can kill your capital after a few years. Hence my biggest concern would be the percentage charged for trading.
In regards to making a "S&P - company/sector" portfolio, how can you compete with other ETF issuers? I feel like you wouldn't be able to get an expense ratio close enough to other large ETFs for the risk weighted return to overcome it. You can maintain a low expense ratio that down weights a sector by combining ETFs. But instead of having a high AUM to reduce churn, that expense is on me.
Would you consider making the optimizer available as a standalone tool?<p>I've wanted a tool to do this - set a target portfolio and tell me what trades to make, taking into account transaction costs and index rebalances. I just want to buy some broad indexes so it would be great if I could buy VOO and VWRL and forget about it, but ETFs are tax-disadvantaged in my jurisdiction [0] so I tried to replicate them manually in spreadsheets. I would consider switching brokers to someone who offered this tool, though right now you're not available in my area.<p>[0] <a href="https://nationalpensionhelpline.ie/taxation/tax-on-investments-savings-ireland/" rel="nofollow">https://nationalpensionhelpline.ie/taxation/tax-on-investmen...</a>
Hi JJ and Mark, I'm a quant on an index desk at a hedge fund. I had a look around your app, it's interesting - I have a few comments, I'd be happy to share them if you hit me up at: reedf1@gmail.com
Congratulations on the launch! Wishing you the best of luck.<p>Q: why only US residents? Other brokerages in the US take in non-US residents (in my case, not even a US person).
Am I supposed to be able to side-scroll those categories in /explore? Can't find any way to, and the last card is half cut off. I'm intrigued to explore strategies I'd never thought about, but can only see about 3 cards per category.<p>This is Brave on Windows.<p>Would also be nice to know in advance what the price/profit model will be (on the site, I see you've answered it here). I would expect a brokerage to be a long term relationship.
The way actual index funds vs individual balancing works is different.<p>For individuals if you buy a stock and sell it at loss within 30 days, that’s considered a wash sale. AFAIK doing trades like that are penalized and not considered losses from tax perspective.<p>So if you’re balancing the portfolio everyday like FNILX and VOO with 500 trades, you’d be racking up tons of wash sales.<p>IRS will come knocking if you fraudulently claim losses.
If I were to set up a customized S&P500 (with some tweaks) and over time companies leave and/or are added to the index. Will those changes be reflected in my custom S&P500? In the months or years in the future will it buy or sell these new currently unknown companies?
I really enjoyed how under Explore, if I set "Risk Tolerance" to "Low" (which it is) there are zero options (until the Bogglehead??? forum creations). This has helped steel my resolve against investing.
Can someone ELI5 this vs all of the other options? Say I have a $300k in RSUs and a handful of stocks and a 401k w/ fidelity. What does this do? Also is this similar to the etrade portfolio things?
M1 Finance also has this capability, does it not? Lyn Alden maintains her newsletter portfolios using M1. (I'm Canadian and to my knowledge, no established company does this well for Canadian accounts.)
So ... where's the edge? "Create your own portfolio" doesn't sound at all like you're taking any responsibility in making sure Average Joe gets any competitive advantage to stay above the market.<p>Seems yet another tool like Robinhood and a trillion alike that offers you the possibility to gamble some money, with absolutely no advantage over a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper's financial pages.<p>By the way, do you want an edge? Or at least understand what an edge is and how it's supposed to feel like? Take a look at my quantitative finance tutorials, good stuff will be coming soon, until now I only got to cover a rigorous introduction: <a href="https://www.aquarianz.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.aquarianz.com/</a> (Another QUAntitative RIsk ANalysis Zoftware)
how does this work with taxes? When an ETF rebalances, there is no tax impact, but wouldn't there be a tax impact with this tool as you're individually managing the stocks?