High or low is relative to the individual. Based on your response it seems that StashAway might be high risk towards you because you're more concerned about potential losses than potential gains. If losses make you worry so much it means you're an individual with low appetite for risk.

I would like to also highlight the following:

1) Forex risk. StashAway uses USD to invest in portfolios, so there is a risk of currency exchange rate working against you when you withdraw/deposit, as StashAway needs to convert from MYR to USD to invest, and vice versa when you withdraw.

To use myself as a personal example:

I started an SRI 16% portfolio in mid 2020. From mid 2020 to start of 2021, there was a massive bull run and stocks climbed to an all time high. HOWEVER, during that same time period MYR strengthened greatly vs the US dollar. So by February 2021, my portfolio when seen in USD has over 30% gains. However when seen in MYR (which is the important part as it's what I'll get in cash if I withdraw), my gains was only around 10%

2) Risk of user being itchy fingers and play around with risk index. Because StashAway makes it very easy to switch risk index, if you keep switching indexes you can cause yourself to incur losses from cost of selling + switching.

If you want to use StashAway to grow wealth, treat it like a savings account/EPF account that you won't touch, ever, until you've reached your goal timeframe/amount. Deposit opening amount, setup a direct debit mandate for monthly/quarterly deposits, then DON'T TOUCH IT until you're ready to withdraw.

No reason to turn it off. Reoptimising is where StashAway adjusts the portfolio to buy new ETFs that they think will perform better, and sell off old ETFs where they think are underperforming. This will probably happen maybe once a year or every few years. This ensures that gains remain steady and you don't end up stuck in stagnant/underperforming funds.

"switching" in StashAway doesnt really work the same way as mutual fund switching. StashAway has a set of ETFs they invest in; what each SRI does differently is that each level of SRI has different ratio of weight (read: how much % of your money goes into which ETF) based on asset clas.

Example would be 6.5% SRI having around 38% government bond ETFs and only 6% international equities ETFs, while 36% SRI is more than 60% invested into equities with 0 bonds in portfolio.

When you adjust risk what happens is that the target weight ratio charges, so SA will sell off the excess units of "overweight" asset class and use the money redeemed to buy different asset classes' units, to put the portfolio in the correct SRI. This can cause issues because it means you'll realise any loss/gains you made in the sold-off units, and if timing bad you may end up buying units at market high.

Over time as unit prices usually trend upward, constant adjusting risks means you end up with less units overall than if you simply opened a new portfolio at different risk and invested there without touching the old portfolio. This will affect the dividends paid for your ETFs as dividends are paid by number of units owned, and thus in long run will affect the compounding interest of your portfolio.

The thing with equities is that how and when it goes up and down is half guesswork, half luck. 

Recent example for example, no one could have predicted that pandemic happen worldwide and cause market to crash, and similarly no one could have predicted that so fast after the pandemic there was a big bull run in market especially in Chinese tech stocks.  :confused:  Similarly no one expected China to suddenly so swiftly clamp down on market enough to push those same stocks down. 

What IS constant is that in the very long run, things eventually go up. At least for the past few decades la So key is to stay invested and don't put all your eggs in one basket, haha

So far nothing indicates that the ETFs in SAMY are going to fail badly la, if that's the assurance you need.

You lose money when ETFs pay dividends, coz of 30% withholding tax.

Dividends are only good thing in MY SG HK