TuringTrader Review: Portfolios for DIY Investors

Today we are going to review the TuringTrader.com website and share our thoughts after using the platform for the past few months. We’ll cover exactly what TuringTrader is, what types of traders it’s made for, and whether or not it’s the right fit for you.

We have a partner relationship with TuringTrader, so if you decide you want to give them a try after reading this review, use this link to create an account.

 

What is TuringTrader

TuringTrader.com is a website serving DIY investors that offers free and paid membership tiers (more on that later) that allow you to access over 20 different portfolios. If you’re not sure what a portfolio means, it’s just another term for a trading system.

All of the portfolios on TuringTrader are research-driven, rules-based solutions that use historical market data, academic studies, as well as books and blogs to form their investing decisions.

That means you won’t find any single person calling the shots or manually signaling the trades. Everything is codified, rules-based, and designed to produce higher returns with lower risks compared to static buy-and-hold alternatives.
 

Who is behind TuringTrader?

The founder, site developer, and lead portfolio designer is Felix Bertram. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he was a guest on our Smarter Trading Podcast Episode #3:

Felix holds an MBA and master’s degree in electrical engineering and has business experience from multiple innovative startups. He started venturing into finance and quantitative trading out of frustration over financial services and available investment products.

Who is TuringTrader made for?

If you want a modern way to invest in the stock market and a better alternative to static buy-and-hold portfolios then TuringTrader might be for you.

Furthermore, if you’re someone who finds comfort investing in portfolios whose decisions are codified and have been tested on historical market data then TuringTrader might be a great fit for you.

If this sounds familiar, it’s exactly the type of trader our own trading systems are built for.
 

Selecting the right TuringTrader Portfolio

Selecting an investment portfolio is a very personal decision. Finding the right fit will come down to your personal goals, risk tolerance, account size, and, frankly, a whole lot more. Fortunately, TuringTrader has dozens of portfolios for you to choose from so chances are there’s something there waiting for you.

After you create an account it’s best to start with the interactive Portfolio Wizard to get help narrowing down the list of investment choices you have. Just answer a few quick questions and in 60 seconds you’ll be given a list of suggestions to start with.

You’ll also notice a very helpful interactive portfolio comparison chart which plots all of TuringTrader’s portfolios in one single grid for you to visually see how aggressive and risky each portfolio is.

You can hover over the dots to get an at-a-glance read on average returns and average risk measures.

Once you settle on a portfolio, you can visit its portfolio page and read more about how it operates and you can also take a closer look at its historical performance.

Not only do you get a great long-term view of the equity curve with drawdowns to visualize performance over the years but you can also hover over any of the dates and read the specific account values and percentage up/down the portfolio performed on that day compared to its benchmark.

Trading with TuringTrader Portfolios

Now that you’ve selected your portfolios to invest in, it’s time to get into the fun stuff — following along with new orders and placing trades! Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at TuringTrader’s Investor’s Dashboard. It lists all of your account groups, balances, and at-a-glance returns.

When you log in, you’ll notice there’s a big green rebalance button that appears when there’s an action for you to take.

Once you click on the rebalance button you’ll be presented with more details about the portfolio, your current position holdings, how many shares you have, and most importantly, how many shares you need to buy or sell to stay up to date with the portfolio.

You can choose to receive email notifications every time it is time to rebalance so you never have to worry about missing the next trade. Learn more about managing your investments here.
 

TuringTrader membership plans & features

Now that you’ve had an overview of the site and features, let’s go through the different membership options available.

TuringTrader Basic Plan

The basic plan is a completely free membership, and it’s a great place to start and get a feel for the website and dashboard. With the basic plan, you’ll be able to invest in over a dozen portfolios from well-known industry experts and, as a bonus during your first 14 days, you’ll also get all of the portfolios, benefits, and features from the premium plan.

TuringTrader Premium Plan

The premium plan is the most popular membership because it gives you full access to the entire suite of premium portfolios. These are proprietary portfolios that historically have achieved more profit for less unit of risk and can only be found on TuringTrader. In this membership tier, you’ll also unlock rebalance alerts which will notify you by email when it’s time to take action.

TuringTrader Infinite Plan

The infinite plan is the supercharged plan for investing professionals. There aren’t technically any new portfolios in this tier, however, there are advanced features that will make your trading life easier. We said technically there are no new portfolios because the big unlock in this membership tier is account groups.

Account groups will allow you to combine multiple portfolios together to create one single meta-portfolio allocation. That means you can allocate to portfolios A, B, and C altogether in one single account where you’ll be able to analyze the historical performance and review the consolidated asset allocation of grouped accounts easily.

When selecting the infinite plan, you’ll also unlock API access which will allow you to automate your portfolio rebalancing with select brokers.
 

TuringTrader Market Vane

One other free-for-all perk on the site that everyone can enjoy is TuringTrader’s proprietary market regime indicator called Market Vane. In order to help determine the current balance of risk and the overall state of the market, TuringTrader uses a blend of stock market momentum, economic growth, stocks/bonds ratios, and volatility to give an easy-to-understand read on current market conditions.

Readers can check in on this indicator week by week and get a quick feel of where we stand. You can read more about Market Vane Indicator here.

Deciding if TuringTrader is right for you

The most important considerations for subscribing to TuringTrader boils down to finding a portfolio fit (philosophy) that you resonate with, can stick with for the long haul, and achieves the right balance of returns and risk to meet your investing goals.

TuringTrader has dozens of portfolios for you to choose from with transparent track records, so shopping for your perfect portfolio match is easy. The website is great, functional, and intuitive to use, which makes it easy for the trader to stay up-to-date with new signals.

Felix is routinely enhancing the website month over month adding new portfolios, site enhancements, and even features like the recently rolled out API Access for infinite plan subscribers to automate and streamline their rebalancing using their favorite broker.

We’ve enjoyed our access to TuringTrader over these past few months and if you’re shopping for DIY investment solutions we recommend signing up for a TuringTrader trial to see if it’s a good fit.