Flexible portfolios let's you choose any number of ETFs to make up a portfolio. One-fund flexible portfolio means you make a flexible portfolio, but only choose one (1) ETF inside. It can be any ETF. Example: ISAC 99%, cash 1%.

You're sorta right. SA's investment direction is sorta-kinda guided by this "algorithm" called ERAA. If things go well, they just adjust the portfolio based on what ERAA recommends and leave it at that. However, as a safeguard, they have allowed themselves to intervene if unusual market conditions happens. Where this intervention comes in is based on the StashAway Risk Rating (SRI) of your portfolio, the highest risk rating being 36%. This means, calculated from the peak of the portfolio's value, if the portfolio's value drops 36% (aka drawdown), a panic button is pushed, and everything is reset. At the height of the KWEB debacle, StashAway's portfolios containing KWEB were very close to touching this number, and hence a human intervention was made to exit KWEB. They were just doing what their investment product said to do, i.e. confine portfolio drawdowns to the stated SRI numbers. If an SRI 36 portfolio has a drawdown of 40%, that would be a bigger failure for StashAway, because having a drawdown greater than the stated SRI number is exactly what their investors did not sign up for. In that regard, exiting KWEB is exactly the objective move that is called for, because "holding to KWEB hoping that it will rebound" is the exact definition of "not being objective". Certain conditions met => execute action, no dilly dally.

After having invested with SA for 3 years now, does that portfolio still align with your investment thesis (aside from the line always going up)? Investment is a long term game. It takes 15 to 20 years for the equity risk premium to reliably show up.

Look at the portfolio in detail. Does the portfolio reflect what you understand about investing currently? Would you still buy into that portfolio today? Why not?

For reference, being up (in USD terms) for a lumpsum investment that was done in Jan/Feb 2020 is already outperforming an equivalent investment in an all-world ETF (which is currently still down ~3% from Jan/Feb 2020) or in the S&P500 (about 0% since Jan/Feb 2020).

This post has been edited by DJFoo000: Sep 26 2023, 09:18 PM