Comment by jycool

As much as I think the article makes great points (tax-loss harvesting seems oversold, and Vanguard is a much cheaper way to get a target date fund than Wealthfront), I gotta raise my hand here and point out the absurdity of this argument against proportional fees. Wealth management is like any business-- a combination of fixed and variable costs. And like many businesses, it amortizes those fixed costs against basically a variable fee structure because the value of the service to the customer (debatable as it may be for some investment products) is proportional to the account size. It's not an SV vs WS thing. Nobody charges according to the marginal cost of the service. Why does Airbnb charge a percentage of the rental cost? Why does Uber get a percentage of the fare? Why does the restaurant charge me the same for a burger at 10pm as a burger at 7pm (after all, the staff are already being paid for the day and ingredients already purchased)? It might sound good to say "hey, the software's not working any harder so the marginal cost is zero", but that doesn't work in almost any business.