I last took a look at PortfolioPilot a year ago, and since their email frequency seems to have ticked up, I figured I’d give it another look.
If you don’t feel like looking at the old review, the TL/DR is “good promise, errors in the data make me hesitant to recommend it”.
And guess what? Nothing has changed in that regard. All the lovely formatting in the world, all the tailored recommendations, all the graphs and charts are pretty much useless if PortfolioPilot can’t accurately reflect what’s underneath the ETFs in my portfolio.
Now, bear in mind that I’m a big fan of all-in-ones, and these are essentially “funds of funds”, so if you DON’T hold these kinds of assets, then your perception of PortfolioPilot’s usefulness might be quite different. For me, if PortfolioPilot doesn’t have an accurate handle on what I actually own, it can’t have an accurate handle on anything else: the risk calculations, the forecasts, the recommendations — all are suspect.
Problem number 1: PortfolioPilot doesn’t know what’s in XGRO
So here’s the breakdown PortfolioPilot shows when you give it a portfolio with just XGRO in it:
The first few entries are accurate, per the XGRO product page. As of April 17, 2026, it reports:
- 36.31% in ITOT, the iShares Core S&P Total US Stock Market1
- 20.31% in XIC, the iShares Core S&P/TSX Capped Composite2
- 20.21% in XEF, the iShares Core MSCI EAFE ETF3
So it’s got about 3/4 of the holdings right so far. PortfolioPilot now reports that XGRO holds 12.3% in a BondBloxx ETF. This is dead wrong. I’ve never heard of it, and “BB rated USD High Yield” sounds rather speculative, not something I’d want to invest 10% of my hard-earned money in. How can this kind of error creep in? My friend google gives a hint for those in the know:
The clue? The symbol of this ETF per Google Gemini is “XBB”. XGRO does not hold XBB on any US market4. XGRO does, however, hold XBB.TO, which, admittedly, is also a bond fund, but its description is a lot more boring:
Why XBB? Low cost, broad exposure to the Canadian investment grade bond market
XBB by Bondbloxx is clearly a much different animal than XBB by Blackrock, and that’s a pretty big miss.
There’s more to shake your head at, though. PortfolioPilot has “other equities” sitting at 7% of the portfolio. This is also wrong. XGRO is an 80/20 fund, which means it’s 80% equity. 75% of it we’ve already talked about (ITOT, XIC, XEF), and the other 5% is the next line in the PortfolioPilot report, namely XEC, the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets fund. So by PortfolioPilot’s estimation, XGRO is about 88% equity, which is off by 8 percentage points.
Anyway, two pretty serious errors for a fund that makes up 15% of my retirement portfolio.
But perhaps it’ll do better with a fund based in the USA?
Problem #2: PortfolioPilot doesn’t know what’s in AOA either
AOA is even a more important fund for me at the moment: it’s 50% of my portfolio, give or take. So what does PortfolioPilot have to say about what’s underneath?
I don’t really know where to begin with this breakdown. Perhaps it’s faster to point out what it has right:
- iShares US Aggregate Bond ETF (IUSB) percentage is correct
The rest is pretty much random:
- PortfolioPilot claims the top holding of AOA is a Vanguard fund. Given that AOA is a product of iShares (a major competitor of Vanguard) this seems rather unlikely. And it is, I assure you, completely wrong.
- PortfolioPilot correctly says that AOA holds the S&P 500 ETF (IVV) but the percentage is totally wrong. Per the AOA product page, it sits at about 45%
- The other three major holdings (namely “other”, iShares Real Estate and SPDR Gold) are all wrong. AOA holds none of these.
Of course, my test is a very small sample, but important to me. If you do use PortfolioPilot, I’d make very sure that it accurately reflects what you actually own; otherwise the rest of the service cannot possibly work correctly. I’ll let you know if/when the situation at PortfolioPilot changes, but until it does, I’m not trusting it even at its free tier.
