Robo performance for medium-risk portfolios

Who were the top performers?

And what exactly is 'medium risk'?

The financial industry has a habit of throwing about a bunch of words and phrases that can mean different things to different people. The term 'medium risk' might be a bit trickier to define than 'low risk' or 'high risk', because it's kind of like standing in the middle of the road or having your glass half empty/half full.

So here's a summary of what a medium-risk robo portfolio should look like and what sort of performance you might expect:

• If you invest in medium risk funds, you will be exposed to a mixture of fixed income, cash and company shares.
• Basically, that means your portfolio will include a mix of high-risk and low-risk investments.
• Only a minority of your investments will be in company shares, whereas some high risk investments are almost exclusively held in shares.
• The performance of medium-risk investments generally falls in the 'middle' of low- and high-risk portfolios.
• Interestingly, in our latest robo data, some of our medium-risk portfolios actually produced better two-year returns than our worst-performing high-risk portfolios - although that isn't something that you should normally expect.
• The investment industry often uses words like 'balanced' or 'confident' to describe medium-risk robo portfolios.

Boring Money collects performance data, in some cases through its own test accounts with the providers. The % allocated to shares is based on the data available at the end of December 2021 and may vary over time.

The portfolios selected here are those identified by Boring Money as the medium-risk options most prominently presented to customers. Some providers may have other portfolios available at different risk levels (i.e by offering more than 3 portfolio options).

Average performance figures below are the median average return for the risk level.

Medium Risk Portfolios

Medium risk portfolios have returned on average 13.34% since the start of January 2020. For comparison, the FTSE 100 returned -3.12% and the S&P 500 returned 47.34% for the same two-year period. Money in the top paying 2 year fixed Cash ISA is currently earning 1.2% a year.

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