Direct indexing is an investment strategy that has typically been reserved for wealthy investors with expensive advisors. However, with the rise of automated investing tools and commission free trading, we believe investors should have access to this innovation.
Direct Indexing gives users the diversification benefits of an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) while avoiding some of their downsides like expense ratios and the inability for a ETF to tax-loss harvest. The problem has always been the manual work involved in direct indexing. Double solves this by doing the heavy lifting for you.
How does it work?
It works first by you, the user, selecting a fund or strategy of interest. Think the US 500 or a Sector or Factor Specific ETF. Double then grabs the underlying funds most recent weightings for the stocks within that Fund.
We take these weighting, and buy the individual underlying stocks using fractional shares to match the funds target weights as close as we can. For example if you deposit $20,000 and use Double to buy the S&P 100, we will take roughly 38% of it and invest that in the 15 Information Technology stocks that are part of the S&P 100. This means as of Aug 1st, 2024 10.48% gets targeted to MSFT, 9.45% towards Apple, etc etc.
We analyze your portfolio at least once a week, looking at how far off from the most recent S&P 100 targets you are. If our optimization engine determines that you will be better off, it will trade to buy and sell stocks to get you back as close to the S&P 100 targets as possible.
We believe direct indexing is ushering in the next wave of investing. It offers investors all of the benefits of its predecessors (mutual funds and ETFs), with added flexibility, lower cost (no expense ratios) and boosted potential returns from tax loss harvesting.