Cale Smith

The company formerly known as KaChing is now Wealthfront. Here’s the full announcement – and here’s what else has changed:

You’ll probably notice the biggest changes in the following areas:

• We heard investors want help selecting professional managers, so we changed the focus of our user experience to recommend outstanding money managers for each person’s investment needs. For the do–it-yourselfers, we still offer the unparalleled transparency and access to data you’ve come to expect from us.

• We added a large array of outstanding professional money managers using our methodology that identified high performing managers. If you had invested in a composite of the managers on our site over the past year, you would have outperformed the S&P 500 by over 6% net of fees.* Included among our new managers are a couple of highly acclaimed mutual funds and a very successful hedge fund. As best as we can tell, this represents the first time mutual funds have opened themselves up to full transparency.

• We now require all our money managers to be Registered Investment Advisers. We want you to rest comfortably knowing we continue to search for the most capable and experienced professional investors we can find to manage your money. We should also note that only 1-in-10 managers who apply qualifies to be recommended on our site.

• We created a much more simple, streamlined – yet richer – experience to help potential customers open new accounts and help customers receive recommendations, compare managers and ultimately, select the most appropriate managers for their long-term investment needs.

• We grew the assets invested on our platform to more than $130 million in our first year. This is a tremendous accomplishment during a time when individual investors have been dumping stocks in favor of bonds (which any contrarian investor will tell you is the best time to buy stocks).

• We just registered our affiliate, Wealthfront Brokerage Corporation, as a broker/dealer, which means more regulatory oversight and the ability to improve on the quality of notifications you receive about your managers’ investment behavior.

Whew! $130 million in assets the first year. Nice work! I’m presuming much of that was from PMs moving assets over, as opposed to growing it from scratch, but hey…I’m all for sticking it to mutual funds no matter how it happens.

Clearly a company to keep an eye on as another potential custodian, no?