Can I pick the individual stocks in my Ellevest portfolio?

No — not on Ellevest’s digital investing platform. We don’t offer the option to include (or exclude) specific stocks or other investments from your portfolio. (Note: Ellevest Private Wealth Management works differently.)

Why not? 

Ellevest is a fiduciary, meaning it’s our job to put your interests first. And basically, we don’t believe picking stocks is in your best interest — not when you’re investing toward a long-term goal, which is what Ellevest is built to help you do.

Buying and selling individual stocks is risky. Nobody can consistently predict how an individual investment is going to perform — not even people who are paid to do it professionally.

Instead, once you’ve told us about yourself and your goals, we match you up with a smart, research-backed, diversified investment portfolio. If you were to pick and choose specific investments, that could mess up the diversification of your portfolio and impact the likelihood that you’ll hit your goal. It could also accidentally place you in a concentrated stock position, which is risky.

Plus, we don’t even use individual stocks or bonds in the portfolios we recommend — we only use exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and mutual funds. (Here’s why we like them.)

We recommend investing a bit out of every paycheck, if you can, into broadly diversified portfolios like the ones we create for you. But if you do choose to buy individual stocks elsewhere, we recommend only using money that you can afford to comfortably use.

So what can I do to control my portfolio?

There are a few options you can customize for each of your goals’ portfolios. First, you can choose to use an impact portfolio, which includes more investments that could help make the world better for women. And second, for all of our goals except Retirement, you also have the option to adjust your portfolio’s overall level of risk up or down by a small amount. (But most people just leave this alone.)