
Does it mean that WealthFront mis-represents their AUM? - Dmit3000
It looks WealthFront started to misrepresent AUM on their web site. Their website now shows $1,550 million AUM for Month 34 (~September 2015). https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wealthfront.com&#x2F;two-billion#100-million<p>Their SEC 13F Holdings Report for the year ending 9&#x2F;30&#x2F;15 shows $2,501 million AUM http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.secinfo.com&#x2F;d12Pk6.m1945.htm
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chollida1
13F filings don't show any short positions or any private positions.

I"m guessing this is mostly what leads to this discrepancy. It's also a reason
why the industry really hates 13F filings. They don't tell the whole story.

A fund could show they are long $1,000,000,000 of Microsoft but have in the
money puts for the same delta value making them effectively flat Microsoft in
the real world. But according to the 13F filing they are long.

Infact this is often one of the first mistakes people make when joining the
industry. They see the 13F and figure that they now know what positions a
hedge fund has, when in reality its more akin to saying you've see Facebook's
source code by selecting show code from your web browser.

Those two things are related but very far apart.

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Dmit3000
Thanks for your response. My concern is that they claim that "each of our
selected asset classes is represented by a low cost, passive ETF."
[https://research.wealthfront.com/whitepapers/investment-
meth...](https://research.wealthfront.com/whitepapers/investment-methodology/)

So it is supposed to be a long-only strategy and therefore, theoretically, in
their case their 13 F filing should be consistent with their reported AUM.

What do you think?

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nanis
I am not sure. Their web page doesn't work very well. The one chart I could
spot doesn't seem to show September '15, and it stops at $2 billion.

The bigger problem with WealthFront is the question of how many paying
accounts they have (given that they don't charge for accounts under $10K).
Let's say all of the $2.5 billion are paid accounts.

As far as I can understand, they would be collecting about $520,833/month now
that they have reached $2.5 billion AUM, assuming all the accounts are paying
accounts.

There seems to be a sustainability problem in there somewhere.

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Dmit3000
Yup, the second slide from the bottom shows their CURRENT AUM and it is lower
than the number filed in their September 2015 13 F form ($2 billion now vs.
$2.5 billion in SEC filing in September 2015).

I agree with you about potential sustainability issues - they need to grow
their AUM really quickly to justify ~$100 MM in venture capital investments.

