Episode
Automating Your Portfolio: M1 Finance vs. Fidelity Basket Portfolios
- Podcast
- Sound Investing
- Published
- May 27, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2734
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/sound-investing-342834/episodes/automating-your-portfolio-m1-finance-vs-fidelity-basket-portfolios/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/sound-investing-342834/automating-your-portfolio-m1-finance-vs-fidelity-basket-portfolios.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
In the final episode of the 2026 Boot Camp series, Paul Merriman sits down with Chris Pedersen and Daryl Bahls to tackle the last fork in the road every investor faces: how to and how much automation to use. After all the boot camp decisions — stocks versus bonds, which equity asset classes, how much fixed income, how to handle contributions and withdrawals — the final question is how much of the day-to-day management you should hand off to a tool, and which tool is right for you. Chris walks through how M1 Finance “pies” let buy-and-hold investors put their portfolios on autopilot: automated contributions, on-the-fly rebalancing as new money comes in, fractional shares, and one-button rebalancing. He explains the pre-configured Merriman portfolios — the Ultimate Buy and Hold, Worldwide and US Four-Fund, All Value, All Small Cap Value, and the Aggressive Target Date glide path in five-year increments — and an important limitation: once you grab a pie, there’s no live link back to the source, so website updates won’t change your account. Paul then makes the case for Fidelity’s Basket Portfolios as an alternative, especially for anyone uneasy about moving large sums to a younger company. He covers the flat $4.99-per-month fee regardless of account size, eligible account types, the TFLO short-term Treasury workaround for holding cash, and why Fidelity may fit investors already in the Fidelity ecosystem. The team compares trading windows, account minimums and how each firm counts the $10,000 threshold, and Daryl shares that M1 has grown from about $1 billion in 2020 to roughly $12.5 billion in assets under management. The conversation closes with practical guidance on mixing and matching Sound Investing portfolios, the…