Anybody use or have experience with Motif?

[mtn]

What are your thoughts? I'm curious about it kind of as an alternative to my regular investments. Normally this is way out of line for me, until I saw an ad for it through Mint.

Through Mint I saw an ad for Motif investing, with an "up to $150 free!" thing. https://www.motifinvesting.com/offers/offer_150trade Well, that got me to click on it. It looks like if you open an account with $2,000 or more and make 5 trades within 30 days of opening, and leave it there for 45 days, within 45 more days they'll deposit $150 into your account. So since it is $10 a trade, it is actually only $90 that you’re getting. But still, that is a 4.5% return in 1.5-3 months (ignoring whatever the market does for the time you are actually invested in motifs). It says that it must be a motif trade: “A motif trade is defined as a completed purchase or sale of a motif for $9.95 commission. Individual stock trades will not be considered as part of this offer.” A motif is basically an ETF, from what I understand.

So if I'm reading it right, I could put $2000 into an account with them, buy two Motifs for as cheap as possible, sell both the next day, and buy another. I have 5 trades, $2000 in an account, and $90 coming to me--the last motif that I'd bought to get to 5 trades could either be sold again, or else .

Seems silly for just $90, but I am also at a point in my life where that extra money is adding up. For what would probably be about 1 hour of total involvement, I'd be happy for $90. Stupid? Dangerous (assume I'd be in blue-chips only)?

[milesdividendmd]

Definitely not dangerous, if its worth the hassle to you, go for it!

As to Motif, I had high hopes but I'm not a fan.  They nickel and dime you for everything.  It's nice buying 30 ETFs for a flat $10 rate, but every rebalance is another $10 and they don't reinvest dividends, so you end up with a lot of money on the sidelines.  Just kind of a clunky experience and not very investor focused.

I do like making motifs and tracking them prospectively for research purposes, but no need to invest with them to do this.

[mtn]

Thanks for the reply.

I think I am going to go through with it, there are a bunch of Motif's that are just Vanguard funds--like this one: https://www.motifinvesting.com/motifs/lazy-3-portfolio#/overview

Plan is to
1: Buy some shares of the one listed above
2: Buy some more shares of it
3: Buy some more shares of it
4: Buy some more shares of it
5: Sell it all on day 40 of the account being open
6: Wait up to 30 days and get $150

This should meet all the requirements to get the $150, I'll have made $100 net, and then I can move that money back into my Vanguard account and plow it into whatever mutual fund or ETF I would have been in otherwise. And take the $100 and move it into my short-term goal checking account.

[milesdividendmd]

Why not just make your own motif with a simple vanguard ETF?  Less hassle when you transfer it over to vanguard.

[mtn]

Why not just make your own motif with a simple vanguard ETF?  Less hassle when you transfer it over to vanguard.

I will have to check to see if that counts for the promotion. I'm not sure if you need to have a Motif-made Motif. Otherwise that would be a really good idea.

[Red Beard]

Not speaking to the sign-up bonus side - a buddy of mine and I had been talking about different "cost effective" investment vehicles and motif came up.

We decided to run a "live" test to see what the benefit would be and discovered that motifs can be decent vehicles for investing in a specific portion of a sector with a pre-determined target date.

For example, instead of an energy index, we invested in "black gold", a mid/large-cap domestic producer motif with a one year horizon. We also invested in the "drug patent cliff" motif when merger whispers started (expected horizon .5 years).

We did our research and we have made a pretty decent return at this point while still (theoretically) getting more diversity than if we would've picked a single stock in a sector. Do I think this is a long term solution? Probably not - but as someone recovering from "active trader syndrome" it has been a fun experiment that I will probably do again.

[mtn]

Still planning on doing this, but I did notice a fee I had missed originally: $25 to transfer money out, or $65 to transfer all the securities.

So it would be (assume the market is stagnent for the 45 days for the sake of this valuation):
- $50 in trades
- $25 in fees to get the money out
+$150
=$75 profit

Now, something interesting that I saw on the fee structure is that it doesn't cost anything to do a partial transfer of your funds. At that point, it may be interesting to transfer all but one share of something out of the account. If you do it right, you could buy a penny stock and you'd have $95 profit (it costs $5 to buy an individual stock). Or you could just leave the funds in there; I'd personally just want them all back in Vanguard for the sake of convenience.