Hidden Philosophies: How Singapore’s Roboadvisors Really Think About Investing

When I started investing in 2011, the landscape was brutal for small investors like me. You had two crappy options: pay ridiculously high management fees through unit trusts, or try to navigate individual stocks and ETFs while getting hammered by brokerage commissions.

I’ll never forget the shock of learning that local brokerages like POEMS and DBS Vickers charged a minimum $25 commission per trade. I could only afford to invest $200 a month back then, which meant every single investment immediately took a 12.5% hit before I even started. Building a diversified portfolio wasn’t just expensive – it was practically impossible unless you had serious money.

Then in 2017, Stashaway launched with an MAS license, followed by Syfe and Endowus in 2019. While I was initially skeptical of them, they’ve improved tremendously over the years. Now, roboadvisors can help anyone set up a portfolio, automate a monthly investment, and move on with their life… all within an evening.

Once you’ve understood the basics and want to actually invest some money, roboadvisors are a fantastic option to start with because they make investing so damn easy.

But how do you decide which one to invest with? While they all look similar on the surface, they’re fighting completely different investment wars underneath.

The Problem with Surface-Level Comparisons

Most articles comparing Singapore’s roboadvisors focus on the obvious stuff: fees, types of ETFs they invest in, and minimum investments. What they miss is the fundamental question: how does each platform actually think about investing?

Do they believe in buying and holding forever? Do they tactically switch between asset classes based on market conditions? What’s their core philosophy about beating the market versus matching it?

These differences matter enormously. In 2021, the performance spread between their highest risk equities-only portfolios exceeded 20%. That’s not random variation. That’s different investment philosophies producing dramatically different results.

The roboadvisors do publish their strategies online, but all of them understandably make their own strategy sound like the “best”. How do you cut through the marketing jargon on their websites, and understand what they are really doing with your money?

So I dug into each platform’s investment strategy, focusing on their “Core” or “Flagship” portfolios which tend to be the most popular option for first-time investors. (Note that each platform also offers other products beyond their core portfolios, but I think it’s better for beginners to keep it simple).

Here’s what I found.

Endowus: The Academic Purist

Endowus builds their Flagship Portfolios on a blend of two strategies: classic passive investing and factor investing (systematically tilting toward certain stock characteristics), both backed by decades of academic research.

The Passive Component

About half of their portfolio goes into vanilla index-tracking funds for stocks and bonds. These funds aim to match the market’s performance, like tracking the MSCI World Index for global stocks. No fancy moves, no attempts to outsmart anyone. Just buy everything and hold for the long-term.

This is the Warren Buffett-approved investing approach for everyday investors: simple, low-cost, and proven to work over the long term.

The Factor Component

The other half focuses on stocks and bonds with specific characteristics that academic research shows have historically beaten the market. This is called “factor investing” (or “smart beta” if you want to impress your friends at dinner parties).

Think of it like this: if regular investing is taking a road trip with basic GPS directions, factor investing is like upgrading to a car with better tyres and more efficient fuel. You’re not changing the route, but you’re using research-backed enhancements that should get you there faster.

Endowus focuses on three main “factors”:

• Value: Companies trading cheap relative to their fundamentals
• Size: Smaller companies that tend to grow faster than giants
• Profitability: Companies with solid earnings relative to their assets

For bonds, they tilt toward longer-term bonds and those with slightly lower credit ratings (while ensuring that the risk of default remains low), both of which historically offer higher returns.

The Academic Backing

Factor investing isn’t just a random tactic cooked up by some finance guru. It has some serious academic credibility, being based on the Fama-French model which was created by Nobel Prize-winning economists. But if it’s so good, why doesn’t everyone do it?

Because it’s psychologically challenging to execute in practice. Factor strategies can underperform for years at a time. Value stocks, for instance, got crushed from 2010-2020 while growth stocks (like Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla) dominated. During those ten years, factor investors watched their “scientifically superior” approach get humiliated by simple index funds.

Endowus is betting that this academic backing will pay off over decades, while mixing in enough plain vanilla investing to help investors survive the inevitable rough patches.

Syfe: The Smart Beta Practitioner

Syfe’s Core Portfolios start from a similar foundation as Endowus – passive investing plus factors – but then add their own practitioner’s twist.

The Baseline Strategy

Like Endowus, Syfe allocates a big chunk to vanilla passive funds tracking developed and emerging markets. But they also add Gold to the mix, which helps to diversify the basic portfolio of stocks and bonds.

Gold is a polarising asset. It doesn’t generate cash flow like stocks or interest like bonds, it just sits there. But it’s also seen as a safe haven during uncertainty. For example, Gold outperformed most asset classes in 2024-2025 amid ongoing conflicts and trade disputes, proving this isn’t just theoretical.

The Factor Twist

Syfe invests in similar factors as Endowus – size and value – but handles “quality” (which is similar to profitability) differently. While Endowus uses a purely quantitative profitability measure (gross profits divided by book assets), Syfe uses the VanEck Morningstar Wide Moat ETF, which focuses on companies with sustainable competitive advantages.

This is a more qualitative approach, looking at things like brand strength, switching costs, and network effects rather than just crunching numbers.

The Tactical Bets

Here’s where Syfe diverges significantly from Endowus: they make specific bets on sectors and countries they think will outperform. Right now, those bets are on technology and China.

You can see this in their holdings (as of Aug 2025):

• Invesco QQQ (US technology companies)
• iShares MSCI China ETF (large Chinese companies)
• KraneShares CSI China Internet ETF (Chinese tech companies)

This means Syfe believes tech and China offer exceptional long-term growth opportunities. But placing these bets also means deprioritizing other sectors and geographies like healthcare, Latin America, and everything else.

Using our driving analogy, Syfe has made the “proven” upgrades like better tires and fuel, but they’ve also added other modifications based on their own analysis: Maybe aerodynamic paint or engine tweaks they think will boost performance. Whether you invest with Syfe depends on whether you buy into these specific, strategic bets.

StashAway: The Macro-Adaptive Strategist

StashAway’s General Investing Portfolios take the most active approach among the three roboadvisors with their proprietary Economic Regime-based Asset Allocation (ERAA) framework.

The Core Philosophy

ERAA operates on the belief that different asset classes perform differently depending on the economic “regime”:

• Good Times (positive growth, low inflation)
• Inflationary Growth (positive growth, high inflation)
• Recession (negative growth, low inflation)
• Stagflation (negative growth, high inflation)

The logic makes intuitive sense. During inflationary periods, you want assets that hedge against inflation like gold and real estate, while avoiding bonds whose value erodes. During recessions, you want to hold cash and bonds while avoiding risky equities.

The Implementation

If StashAway’s algorithm can determine which regime we’re in, they shift your portfolio toward assets that should perform well in that environment. When economic signals are unclear, they switch to an “All-Weather strategy” designed to protect capital during uncertainty.

This worked well in December 2017, when their algorithm flagged significant undervaluation in gold and increased allocations. Gold appreciated 28% over the next three years, validating the approach.

The Challenge

Back to our driving analogy: StashAway’s strategy is like using a GPS that predicts road conditions and routes you accordingly. Recession fears? Take the defensive route. High growth signals? Drive towards equities.

The challenge is that markets are notoriously difficult to predict in practice. By the time economic signals are clear enough to identify the regime, the best opportunities may have already vanished. You’re essentially betting on StashAway’s ability to read economic tea leaves faster and more accurately than the rest of the market.

Why Returns Don’t Tell the Full Story

So which strategy is best? Looking at past returns won’t give you the answer.

First, these platforms have only existed for a few years – way too short to evaluate the effectiveness of their strategies. Even the most robust strategies can underperform for extended periods, like value investing’s lost decade from 2010-2020.

Second, bad strategies can get lucky. Putting all your money in GameStop during the 2021 meme stock rally would have been a terrible strategy that happened to pay off spectacularly, for a brief moment.

The “best” strategy is the one you can stick with for 10 to 30 years through the inevitable ups and downs. You need conviction strong enough to hold steady when your approach looks foolish and everyone else seems to be getting rich with different tactics.

Finding Your Philosophy

Each platform reflects a different belief about how markets work:

• Choose Endowus if you believe in classic passive investing but you’re also comfortable with a slight twist (factor investing) that’s backed by academic research.
• Choose Syfe if you’re generally aligned with passive investing, but also believe that certain “bets” – like Tech, China, and Gold – offer significant long-term opportunities and are worth focusing on.
• Choose StashAway if you believe that the best way to get better returns is to tactically switch in and out of different assets depending on how the economy is doing.

None of these approaches is objectively right or wrong. They’re different bets about market efficiency, the persistence of academic factors, and the feasibility of economic forecasting.

My Entirely Biased And Subjective Take

I’ve been investing a significant portion of my wealth through Endowus’s Flagship Portfolios, which aligns with my investment philosophy that passive investing is the surest way to do better than average. 

And although factor investing seems to contradict the philosophy that you shouldn’t try to beat the market, I’m also convinced by its academic backing. I studied the Fama-French model while doing my Masters in Finance, and the research is compelling enough to convince me to hold through inevitable periods when it looks wrong.

I’m less convinced by tactical bets on specific sectors or countries. The broader market already weights these according to their perceived value. Overweighting them only makes sense if you think they’re systematically undervalued – which is a harder case to make, in my opinion.

Same with trying to time economic regimes. Markets are complex adaptive systems where participants are constantly adjusting to new information. By the time regime signals are clear enough to act on, the opportunities would have likely been arbitraged away.

But I could be completely wrong. That’s what makes investing fun! It lets us express our beliefs about how the world works and see how they play out over decades.

The key is choosing an approach you can stick with through the inevitable periods when it looks foolish. Because in investing, the biggest risk isn’t picking the suboptimal strategy – it’s abandoning any coherent strategy halfway through the journey.

Which investment philosophy resonates with your thinking? I’d love to hear about your own roboadvisor experiences and what factors matter most in your decision-making.