I’ve tried it out with £100 for a few weeks. I would want to try it for at least a few months before delivering any sort of verdict, ideally more like a year. I may add a a little more soon to experiment for a year say but would not like to make a judgement on their performance until at least 6 months or so.
The high percentage based fees are my largest concern with putting any significant sum in, but they are mostly based on performance, which reduces the sting. So around 1% once you get to any significant amount + fees based on percentage gain which kick in after 10% gains. Again, hard to judge without investing for a while but clearly based on the 2 and 20 structure for hedge funds.
I think they are an honest attempt at something a little different (bringing quant-style portfolio management to the retail market - they appear to have a mix of technical signals with human supervision as their system), but as a two time investor and now customer testing I feel they have yet to demonstrate that they will be successful at building a successful business but are executing so far. They appear to have toned down the machine-learning side of their pitch and migrated to more mechanical signals analysis, but I’m reassured that they are entirely based on market data (not for example sentiment data from the likes of twitter).
They do have the relevant permissions for managing client money now in multiple countries, which is reassuring. However the app still feels very beta - they have only just updated it with performance tracking, and they haven’t got withdrawal screens into the app yet (they have them in the web app version). They are currently running at 0.2-0.6% growth per day (so in theory lives up to their hype) but that’s over a few days so pretty worthless as a signal, they will of course have down months, but I’m fairly impressed with their back-testing (against real market data), and the 6 months or so of real data they have collected so far which does include both up months and down months but overall is positive. This is over a time of significant market volatility around Dec 2018 and May 2019 so quite a good test of their claims to limit downside. The back-testing is not so useful IMO as it can be gamed fairly easily, and it’s over a period of massive growth in markets over the last ten years - the next ten years are not going to look like the last 10 years for anyone.
What I would say is they are significantly different from both ETF-based robo-managers (which I feel are pretty worthless), managed funds, market tracker indexes (available on freetrade), and brokers allowing retail customers to choose their own investments (again freetrade). Perhaps a little like one of these actively managed ETFs I guess, but based on their own tech rather than the instincts of fund managers as the humans are in a more supervisory role. The ETF does also sound an interesting idea (if they manage that), and would be a nice way to try it within the freetrade app as long as fees are low. I also like their ideas about creating tailored funds based on their technology (for example an eco fund) - these would work well as ETFs, though I’d be concerned about the fees.
I hope that is helpful. Worth keeping an eye on I think, but not a service I’d trust with a lot of money as yet.