How does Ivy Invest compare to a Roboadvisor?

February 5, 2026 Share

A roboadvisor is an online service that uses algorithms and technology to manage investments automatically. Roboadvisors are alternatives to traditional financial advisors, offering preset asset allocations, regular portfolio rebalancing, and basic financial planning tools. They typically charge lower fees and have lower investment minimums than personal financial advisors.

Like a roboadvisor, Ivy Invest is designed to simplify your investing by providing you a portfolio that you don't have to piece together yourself.

Unlike a roboadvisor, Ivy Invest offers an actively and professionally managed portfolio that follows the investment approach pioneered by large university endowments. Endowment-style investing gives you exposure to a much broader range of investments: stocks and bonds and private equity, venture capital, private credit, special situations, and real estate funds.

Endowment-style portfolios have historically generated significantly higher returns than most roboadvisor portfolios: 11.6%¹ vs. 8.3%². Over a lifetime, this difference in returns could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars more at retirement for the average American³.

Roboadvisors offer a partially customized portfolio, within the limits of their algorithms. We recognize that customization is important to some investors, particularly those with strong views on certain companies or industries.

Ivy Invest offers a single Fund and does not provide customization. The flip side of customization is scale, and we believe that scale provides far more meaningful benefits for the vast majority of investors.

Ivy Invest combines individual shareholder investment dollars into a single, much larger pool of capital. With this larger pool of capital, Ivy Invest is able to access a wider range of investment asset classes, including private equity, private credit, real estate funds and more. In some of these investments, there are high eligibility requirements, such as $1 million minimums or requirements that investors have over $2 million of investable capital. Ivy Invest's Fund investors benefit from our size and don't have to worry about individual eligibility requirements. As another benefit of scale, Ivy Invest also invests at lower fees than are typically possible for individual investors.

Our Chief Investment Officer has more than 18 years of experience managing asset allocation, diversification, risk tolerance, and manager selection for large institutional endowments and foundations. Ivy Invest has brought this approach to the Fund, and we believe the resulting portfolio can provide an optimal risk and return balance for long-term investors.

Tax-loss harvesting is a strategy that can potentially reduce taxable income. It involves selling investments below cost (i.e., taking a capital loss) and using the capital loss to offset capital gains from other investments. This process can help investors lower tax liabilities from capital gains, allowing them to keep more of their investment returns. Many roboadvisors include tax-loss harvesting as part of their service, potentially enhancing after-tax returns.

Note that tax-loss harvesting is a strategy that provides benefits for traditional, taxable investment accounts. You don't pay taxes on gains in an IRA or Roth IRA, so there's no benefit to loss harvesting in those types of accounts.

Our Fund employs tax-loss harvesting in a more sophisticated way. Most roboadvisors are only able to harvest losses at an ETF/index level, limiting the number of harvesting opportunities. Through our subadviser Rhumbline, which manages more than $118B in assets, we employ direct indexing for the Fund's public stock investments. Direct indexing allows us to more granularly harvest capital losses on individual stock investments, which can then offset capital gains across all of the Fund's investments, resulting in a more tax efficient overall portfolio.

A roboadvisor can be a good fit for shorter-term assets. Roboadvisors provide equity exposure (unlike money market funds or savings accounts), while still being fully liquid.

We believe that our endowment-style model is a great fit for your long-term assets – those dollars that you can keep invested for a longer period of time. By investing in less-liquid asset classes like private equity, venture capital, and real estate, endowment-style portfolios have historically outperformed roboadvisor-style portfolios. While we do offer quarterly redemption windows during which investors can sell shares, we've designed our portfolio to maximize benefits for buy-and-hold investors⁴.