TD Ameritrade has lowered the account minimum for its Essential Portfolios robo offering from $5,000 to $500 with one caveat: clients must set up recurring deposits upon opening their account. Reading through the fine print on the company’s Essential Portfolios FAQ page reveals that this must remain the case until a client reaches a $5,000 balance. The annual management fee remains a flat 30 basis points.
A recent survey of 1,006 U.S. adults age 22 and over conducted for TD Ameritrade by The Harris Poll showed that 24% of respondents felt that high investment minimums are a barrier to investing, and that 37% of millennials said they would have started investing at a younger age if the minimums had been lower.
Essential Portfolios officially launched in January 2017 and now has approximately $1.7 billion in AUM (the firm, like several of its competitors, does not disclose the total number of users).
On the RIA front, TD Ameritrade Insitutional has built out integrations to its Veo Open Access platform with 15 white-label third-party robo providers including those of AdvisorEngine, Envestnet, Jemstep, Oranj, RobustWealth, and Trizic among several others---but not that of Essential Portfolios on TD Ameritrade's retail side.
