DRAFT App Review: Simple Portfolio Analysis For Every Investor
Comparing yourself to others isn’t always healthy. For example, you’ll be happier if you’re grateful for the things you have instead of envying the things your friends have.
But in some situations, such as analyzing your investment portfolio, comparisons are useful.
I’m not talking about comparing how much you’ve invested, rather comparing how your investment choices are performing compared to your peers.
For decades, we’ve all used popular indices – the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S&P 500 – as benchmarks to judge whether our own investments have performed better or worse than average.
DRAFT is a new app that may provide you with more – and potentially more useful – ways to see how your investments stack up.
DRAFT recently demoed their product at Finovate, an elite financial technology conference, and is currently in private beta (Money Under 30 readers will be given priority on the waiting list).
Click here to join the waiting list to get the DRAFT app.
What does DRAFT do?
The DRAFT app uses “crowdsourced data to help you understand and compare your portfolio.”
For one, DRAFT provides a big picture of your investments by aggregating all of your investment accounts into a simple dashboard showing your annual return, expense ratio, asset allocation and investing style (conservative, moderate or aggressive).
Although an investment dashboard by itself isn’t novel, the DRAFT dashboard compares your numbers to the “Top 10 Percent” of investors in its database.
There are a couple of things I find useful about this comparison:
1. You can compare your investments to real portfolios
We’re accustomed to comparing the return of our entire investment portfolio to a single index – say the S&P 500.
In reality, the S&P 500 index alone isn’t a comprehensive benchmark. For one, it’s an index consisting solely of large American stocks. Most investors should build a more diverse portfolio that includes bonds and perhaps some smaller stocks and international stocks.
2. Expenses matter, too
Investing costs money. Our costs – mutual fund expenses, trading commissions and/or management fees – directly affect our overall return. An index isn’t a real portfolio and, therefore, doesn’t include expenses.
There is something to be said for simple, set-it and forget-it investing. But even a simple portfolio of index funds needs tending.
For investors who don’t want to geek out researching mutual funds and creating hypothetical portfolio models, DRAFT may provide an impetus to occasionally review your investments to get closer to the Top 10 Percent. (Here’s a situation in which you will want to keep up with The Jones’.)
Is the DRAFT App secure?
In a word, yes.
I’ve reviewed countless financial apps over the years. All of them will claim military-grade untouchable security. That may be true, but no application or Website is 100 percent impenetrable. Depending on how much data an app collects from you, there are still risks when you use some financial applications. But those risks are minimal with DRAFT.
DRAFT does connect to your bank and investment accounts to aggregate your information. They do so, however, through a partnership with Yodlee — one of the most established players in the field of financial account aggregation. In fact, many banks and investment companies use Yodlee to provide financial dashboards to their own users.
DRAFT is read-only. The app pulls data from your investment accounts and will recommend potential trades, but DRAFT doesn’t trade securities or make account changes on your behalf.
Finally, DRAFT dashboards use percentages rather than actual numbers so that onlookers can’t see your account balances. Users can reveal their actual balances momentarily by swiping.
How to sign up for DRAFT
DRAFT is a new app that’s currently in private beta, but Money Under 30 readers will have priority on the waiting list. You can sign up here.
As you probably realize, this is a sponsored post. That said, I don’t accept a sponsored post if I don’t see value in the product for readers, which I certainly do in DRAFT. And in this case in particular, I see very little reason every investor won’t want to try DRAFT to get a fresh look at your portfolio (and see how you compare to the Top 10 Percent, of course).
Click here to join the waiting list to get DRAFT now
This post is part of the #IwantDRAFT campaign with support from DRAFT, the app that uses crowdsourced data to help you understand and compare your portfolio, in partnership with Kasai Media.
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