Friday, 19 June 2020
Written by Marc Chow, Head of Business Development & Partnerships of GAX MD
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MYTHEO will soon be approaching its 1-year anniversary this 28 June 2020. As the 1st Digital Investment Management (DIM) service by a Malaysian fintech company, we have had an amazing year growing more than 22% on a month-to-month basis. We also picked up 2 awards recently, which are the APICTA and SITEC 2019 awards on Fintech Robo-Advisory and Artificial Intelligence. Our award-winning platform automatically creates, manages and optimizes your investment portfolio based on your profile and risk appetite.

That said, robo-advisory services are still in its infancy. So, we thought that it is timely to launch a series of articles/blogs that may address some of the questions that you may have about our services or even robo-advisory in general. Watch this space as I kick-start our very first article on lifestyle investing entitled ‘The Myths of Robo-Advisory (Part 1)’ as we aim to tackle some of your everyday questions about investing via an app in a mild and light-hearted manner, without your typical investment jargons.

‍MYTH #1: What?! You mean a robot does everything?!

‍Not true. Which is why here at MYTHEO, we prefer to use the term ‘Digital Investment Manager’ rather than the cold-hearted term ‘robo-advisor’. While MYTHEO employs the use of algorithms to determine risk and make key investment decisions, our algorithms are maintained by our team of human investment managers based in Japan and Malaysia. They work round the clock to ensure that the algorithms are up-to-speed and perform periodic checks as and when needed. The whole purpose of a Digital Investment Manager is to ensure that menial everyday functions such as running through research reports, company analysis and even trading is fully-automated via algorithms, enabling us to automate much of our everyday processes and thus, reducing headcount cost where necessary. Should you run into any problems at MYTHEO, our Customer Experience Team is also manned by an extremely capable team ensuring a richer customer experience journey.

‍MYTH #2: Robo-Advisors are not personalized.

‍Perhaps some may feel that robo-advisors are not personalized enough as compared to conventional investment instruments where you can speak to a unit-trust consultant or a broker face-to-face as compared to making your investment decisions via an app. While this may hold some truth, compared to traditional investment instruments which are usually one size fits all, MYTHEO seeks to bring personalization via allowing users to customize their own portfolios within the app. Did you know, based on your risk-profile, that there are up to 231 various portfolio combinations that you can end up with. That is an unrivalled level of personalization as compared to buying units in a single unit trust fund or even buying a basket of stocks. At the same time, MYTHEOallows users to create up to 6 different portfolios of their choice with the option of choosing your own portfolio combinations or having MYTHEO decide for you based on your risk-profile given in the on-boarding questionnaire.

‍MYTH #3: Robo-Advisors are better than human advisors/ Human advisors are better than Robo-Advisors.

‍While this will be a constant battle in the investing world, here at MYTHEO, we believe your investing goals should never be compromised by the impractical fight to be better than the other. As a matter of fact, any sound investment professional would advocate a balanced portfolio, made out of different investment instruments both from the digital world as well as the traditional world. Some of the benefits of MYTHEO that makes it an investment instrument of choice include:
• Low-entry at just a minimum of MYR100
• Ability to make transactions easily via the comfort of an app
• Low-fees at just a maximum of 1% per annum
• Easy on-boarding process that can be completed in just 5-10 minutes

Benefits like these make MYTHEO easy, accessible and hassle-free for the masses, not better in any way compared to other investment instruments. As a matter of fact, we highly advocate investment education for all to ensure that investors know in essence what they are investing in and the risks they are willing to take in any given market scenario. Lastly, invest only in what suits you best and what you feel comfortable with, and not by following market trends or what’s trending today.

We hope you enjoyed reading this, stay tuned for more from us in the coming months or so. Do follow us on our social media handles on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and say hi or drop us a comment. Till then, take care.