Wealthfront

Wealthfront is the pioneer of automated investing and one of the original robo-advisors. Founded in 2011, the platform manages over $70 billion in assets by building and rebalancing diversified portfolios of low-cost ETFs based on each investor's risk tolerance, time horizon, and financial goals.

What makes Wealthfront stand out is tax-loss harvesting. Their automated system monitors your portfolio daily and harvests losses to offset gains, which can add 1-2% to your after-tax returns annually. For taxable accounts, this is genuinely valuable. The direct indexing feature (available for accounts over $100K) takes this further by owning individual stocks instead of ETFs to harvest losses at the individual security level.

Wealthfront also offers a high-yield cash account, automated financial planning tools (Path), and portfolio lines of credit. The platform is entirely self-service — there are no human advisors, which keeps the advisory fee at 0.25% (one of the lowest in the industry).