Wealthfront

Wealthfront is a robo-advisor in the strictest sense: software manages your money, and there are deliberately no human advisors to call. You answer questions about your goals and risk tolerance, and it builds a diversified portfolio of low-cost index ETFs, then handles everything afterward — rebalancing, dividend reinvestment, and tax-loss harvesting — automatically for a 0.25% annual advisory fee.

It's also become a serious place to park cash. The Wealthfront Cash Account pays 3.30% APY as of 2026 with no account fees, and spreads deposits across partner banks for FDIC insurance eligibility up to $8 million — well beyond the standard $250,000 at a single bank. For a lot of customers, the cash account is the front door and the investing comes later.

What Wealthfront actually does

The investing product is classic passive portfolio management, executed well. Portfolios span US and international stocks, bonds, and a few diversifiers, weighted to your risk score. The standout is daily tax-loss harvesting: software watches for positions trading at a loss, sells them to bank the tax deduction, and buys a similar fund to keep your allocation intact. Done consistently in taxable accounts, this can offset a meaningful chunk of the advisory fee.

Beyond the core, there's an S&P 500 Direct product that owns individual stocks for finer-grained harvesting, automated bond ladders for locking in Treasury yields, and lower-cost stock investing accounts for people who want to pick a few names on the side. Planning tools model questions like whether you can afford a house in five years, using your actual linked account data rather than guesses.

Key features

• Automated index portfolios with rebalancing and dividend reinvestment, at 0.25% per year
• Daily tax-loss harvesting on taxable accounts, long Wealthfront's signature feature
• Cash Account at 3.30% APY with no fees and FDIC eligibility up to $8 million via partner banks
• Automated bond ladders and an S&P 500 direct-indexing option
• Planning tools that simulate retirement, home purchase, and savings scenarios
• Low minimum of $500 to start an investing account

Who it's for

Self-directed savers who want their investing on autopilot and don't need hand-holding. It suits people in higher tax brackets especially well, since tax-loss harvesting matters most in taxable accounts. If you want to talk to a human when markets drop, look at Betterment's premium tier or Vanguard Personal Advisor instead — Wealthfront's whole philosophy is that software is enough.

Our take

We consider Wealthfront one of the two benchmark robo-advisors, alongside Betterment. The tax-loss harvesting is genuinely industry-leading, the cash account is one of the better no-fee places for savings, and the product has kept improving — bond ladders and direct indexing are things traditional advisors charge multiples more for. It survived a strange chapter in 2022, when UBS agreed to buy it for $1.4 billion and then walked away, and has grown steadily since.

The trade-offs: there is no human advice at any price, which some investors will genuinely miss during a bad market. The 0.25% fee, while cheap next to a traditional advisor, is still more than doing it yourself with a three-fund portfolio at Vanguard or Fidelity. And the cash account's headline APY moves with Fed rates, so don't anchor on today's number. If you accept those terms, it's an easy tool to recommend.