How's it going, everybody. Welcome back to the channel. My name is Jay. And today we're talking about M1 Finance, and I'll save somebody
some time right now. If you're looking for a place
where you can be actively buying and selling and
trading stocks and options and being real hands-on,
M1 Finance is not the place for you, but if you're a
long-term buy-and-hold investor, M1 Finance just might be
the best option out there. So, what is M1 Finance? What's it all about? Like I just mentioned, it's an investing
platform for long-term buy and hold investors. When you invest the M1 Finance, you invest in what they call pies. Basically a pie is made up
of different stocks or ETFs or whatever you wanna be investing in. You select the investments you want. And each one is a slice
of that overall pie. You set the percentages. You want each investment
within your pie to be set up, and M1 Finance takes care of the rest. Trading on M1 Finance is commission-free. You can buy fractional
shares and best of all, you can automate your investing. And honestly. That's my favorite feature. That's what really drew me to M1 Finance in the first place. And while I said, M1
Finance really isn't a place for an active trader or
someone who's gonna buying and selling stocks pretty often. M1 Finance does allow
you to be as hands-on with your investments, as you wanna be, you can choose exactly
which investments you want in your investment pie. You can set the percentages
exactly how you want them. You can change it as you
go all that good stuff, or if you wanna be even more hands off, they have a large number of expert pies, which are pre-made investing strategies or another fun feature of M1
Finance is you can share pies. I created pies that I'm
investing in on M1 Finance. And I link those down in the
description of this video. If you wanna go check out
how I'm investing my money, on M1 Finance. And if you like it, you can add that to your portfolio. Or you can invest in the same pie as I do. So, you can share investment
strategies with the people, you know, or if someone
has one set up, you like, you can use that. So, that's the kind of high-level thousand foot overview of M1 Finance,
but let's start getting in the details. What are the things I
really like about M1 Finance and what are the things I'm not so hot on? So, what do you want first? You want the good news or the bad news? Let's go with the bad stuff first. Let's just rip the band-aid off. Get it out of the way, get it out in the open. We're having an open discussion here. So, the first con on M1 Finance, and this is why I would only recommend it for long-term investing. Buying and hold investing, is there's only one trading window in any given day. This means you can't
log on and buy the stock or ETF you want at any given
point throughout the day. When you have money in
your M1 Finance account that you wanna invest, how M1 Finance handles the
trading is, all the given trades from all the different
customers M1 Finance has it pools them all together
and executes all those trades at 9:30 A.M. each trading day. Now they do have what they call M1 Plus, which is a premium version of
M1 Finance for $125 a year. That gets you a second
trading window at 3:00 P.M.. But still the point
you're only getting one or even two trading times in any day. So, you can't go really
hunting for the best price on any given day or week or whatever. You're just putting your
money in, letting it invest and letting it grow over the longterm. So, you can see why M1
Finance is not for someone who wants to be actively trading stocks, but if you have a portfolio of ETFs, index funds that you just
wanna keep adding to, constantly right over and over and over, then you don't care what
the price you get to today or tomorrow is you just
wanna keep adding money, keep funding that account
and watching it grow. Now, the second con on M1 Finance. The second thing that bugs me, and really this is the
thing that bugs me most. I really had a hard time with this. There's no easy way to move an investment between different pies
without actually having to sell that investment in
one pie and buy it in another. So, you're actually
triggering a sale of a stock, just to move it within two
pies within the same account. So, it seems kind of ridiculous
where if I just wanna reallocate something
within my own account, I actually have to sell my shares. And then rebuy them over here. Kind of ridiculous. And I can't understand why
M1 Finance works that way. Now there is a hack workaround for this, which I might have to do an
entire separate video on, because it would take
me too long to explain, it's kind of complicated,
so you can get around it. But for all intents and purposes, it shouldn't have to be
a hack or a work around, it should be easy and simple. And that is probably my
biggest con on M1 Finance. And the third and final
con I'll mention here about M1 Finance is that
setting up multiple pies can be a little bit confusing at first. I'll get into that a little
more when I actually walked through the app and get
into more detail there. But when I first set out to do it, when I was setting up my
account, it was really confusing. But stick around in this video
and I'll show you how not to make the same mistakes I did. So, we get the bad stuff out of the way. Really, that's all I
had to complain about, about M1 Finance. At this point, the positives I'm gonna
mention far outweigh those, but before we get into the positives, I have to remind you hit the
like button on this video. It really helps me out. I wanna try to get a hundred
on each video I make. So, help me make that happen. I'd appreciate it. So, now the pros of M1 Finance, what are the selling points, what are the features that
it has that I think make it the best investing app out there today? First and foremost, it's the automated investing. It's far and away my number
one favorite feature. It's the sole reason I went
ahead and opened my account in the first place. When I did it, I like to
set things on autopilot, especially long-term
investments like this. I just wanna set it
and forget it and watch it grow over the longterm. So, with M1 Finance, I set up my pie. I allocate my percentages of that pie. I set up my automatic
deposit from a bank account into M1 Finance, and then 9:30 A.M.. The day after that deposit
hits M1 automatically invest that money according to my allocation. And I don't even have to think about it. The other great benefits of M1 Finance, is fractional shares. Really, I don't wanna
invest any place these days that doesn't let you buy
in fractional shares. That's why, even though historically, most of my money has
been with TD Ameritrade and I have no plans on leaving
them or moving that money. I'm making most of my new
deposits into M1 Finance, because I just wanna
invest a hundred, 200, $500 at a time. I don't wanna have to worry
about having the right amount of money for exactly the
number of shares I wanna buy, the next pro to M1 Finance,
no commissions, no fees. Really, that's becoming par for the course for most investment brokers
out there these days. But it's good to see. You're not getting nickeled and dimed with fees on M1 Finance. So, you can get your no
commissions and no fees, and you can sleep easy about it. I also love the interface of M1 Finance. It's sleek, it's clean,
it's relatively minimalist. Like I loved about "Robin
Hood" back in the day. And as an added bonus, the mobile app and the
web platform of M1 Finance are the same. They're both high quality. A lot of places, you either get a good desktop
version of the service and their app sucks, or
they have a great app, but you go to use it on a
web browser and it's garbage. With M1 Finance. It doesn't matter if you're using the app or the web browser. It's great in both places, the menus, everything are exactly
the same in both places. So, when making a video like this, I don't even have to show you both, because it's the same. And last, but certainly not least. I probably should have mentioned this towards the top, customer service. Now, obviously this is the kind of thing, your mileage may vary. I'm sure there are people out there who have had bad experiences, but I actually had to use
customer service on M1 Finance. And I was beyond pleased
with the service I got from their customer service reps. I sent an email about
the issue I was having. I got a response from
them in less than an hour. Now, mind you fidelity is known
for great customer service and email, I sent them
their customer support. Wasn't answered for three days. So, getting an answer from M1
Finance in less than an hour blew me away. So, again, if you're enjoying this so far, please consider giving this
video a like down below, if you're interested in
checking out M1 Finance, you can use my link
down in the description. I think if you use that, you get $30. I get $30. We both go home happy, but no obligation do what you wanna do. So, now let's jump into the M1 Finance App and see what it's all about. Okay, so, here you can
see we're in M1 Finance. This is my core ETF portfolio
that I have mentioned a hundred times on this channel. My favorite four ETFs,
VTI, VXUS, VNQ and BND, got them here in M1 Finance. This is what my portfolio looks like. You can see right at the top. They give you the nice graph of your pie that you're investing in. Down below, you can see
how much money you have in each fund, the percentages compared to the percentages you have
set for your allocations. And if I swipe over to the right, you can see a graph of how I did today. It looks like today was
a down day in the market. Not very good. But not investing in these index ETFs for what they do day-to-day. Okay, so now I mentioned earlier, I would give you a tip
to save you from making the same mistake I initially
did when I set up my account. So, when you sign up for M1
Finance and you wanna pick out your initial investments,
you have some options. You can either pick out your investments and add them straight into your account. Or what you should do is first
create a pie and then add that pie to your accounts. So, to manage your pies
or view any other pies, we're gonna go down to
the research button. Then the three bars up at the top. If you wanna look at the
expert pies that are available, you can click expert pies. And here you can see they
have different categories, general investing, retirement. Income, hedge funds, other strategies. If we just look at responsible investing, responsible investing pie, you can see this pie has five holdings. And if we swipe over, it tells
you what it's investing in, how it's allocated. And if you decided, yeah,
I wanna invest in this. You could add it to your account. You can just add this pie
and start investing in that, same with any of these other ones, there's income earners for
different dividend strategies and so on and so forth. But most people are gonna
wanna create their own pies. So, here you would come to my pies, here you can see the
ones I'm actually using, but I'll show you how to set up a pie. We'll make one right now. Okay, so to create a pie, and this is what you're
initially gonna wanna do. When you set up your
account, come into research. My pie. Hit the plus sign up here. Where we can start building our pie. So, I hit the plus sign again, and here's all the
things we can invest in. We got our stocks, some funds. Or we can add those
expert pies into our pie, and you can do a whole number of things. You can customize your pie,
exactly how you want it. I'm just gonna keep this easy. Let's say, I just wanna go
with some big popular stocks and start building positions in those. I'm going to add Apple to my pie. I want some Amazon. Give me Facebook, Tesla,
and you know, why not? Let's take some Google too. Those five stocks are
what I want my pie to be. I select them. I hit done. And now it takes me to
where you can select exactly how each slice in your pie is weighted. So, let's say I'm really high on Apple. I want Apple to be 50%
of this entire portfolio. Let's say Facebook. I wanna knock down to 10%. Let's see. I'm still over weighted here. Let's say we like Tesla at 25%. Oh, I'm, right. We'll knock Apple down to 40. And let's say Amazon, and
we only want 5% there. I can set my allocations. I got 40% Apple, 10% Facebook, 25% Tesla and 5% Amazon in this pie. Once I'm happy with that,
how that looks, I click save. And it will create the
pie. It'll give me a name. I'll call this like and
subscribe and I'll save my pie. Now you can see this like
and subscribe pie is not used in any of my portfolios. So, now, if I wanted to add
this like and subscribe pie to my portfolio, to my other pies, I'd go back to invest,
down here at the bottom where it says, manage pie,
I'd then go to edit pie. And then click the plus sign. And I would go over to my pies. I'd select like, and subscribe. And click, add to pie. I'm not actually gonna do that because I don't actually
wanna add this in, but that's how you would do it. So, now let's just go through
some of the other features here on M1 Finance, you saw how we create a pie
and we set our percentage for each slice, each investment
within there that we want. You can see here, I've got
VTI at 50%, VXUS at 30%. But what if their performance
gets really out of whack, and VTI is up to 65% of my
portfolio, VXUS is down to 10%. What do we do then? Well, we have options. If we hit manage pie here,
you can click rebalance. And if you do this, and then you click confirm,
tomorrow morning at 9:30 A.M.. M1 Finance will automatically
rebalance my portfolio back to my set percentages. It'll sell off VTI, which got too overweight
and use that to buy VXUS, which got underweight. But by doing that, you are
gonna be selling shares of what our investment is overweight. And that means you'll be realizing gains and have a tax liability on that. Another way to do that is
just to make regular deposits. And when you do that, when you make your regular
deposits M1 Finance will split your deposit, when it goes to invest it
amongst your investments, in order to get them to
their set percentages. So, if VTI was way overweight, but my three other investments were below their target percentages. The next investment I make
into M1 Finance it'll invest it just in those that need to be bumped up to their set percentages. And it'll continue to do
that till your allocation is back in line. Also here under managed pie, you can edit pie where,
if you want to change your percentages around or say, I wanted to add
a fifth fund into this, I could do it right there. Either by messing with the percentages or hitting that plus button and adding in another investments. Another cool little feature
is to click view details. And it'll kind of just give
you the overview of your pie. So, this one has four investments. My four funds, the expense ratio
on my pie overall is 0.06%. And I'm getting a combined
dividend yield of 1.92% out of this. That's really all there is to
the pies and creating the pies and editing the pies. It's really, self-explanatory, some of the other features here. You have M1 spend, they have a debit card, you can get some cash
back, things like that. Like most brokerage has seemed
to be rolling out these days. The next section over,
you can see your transfers of all the money and all the
activity in your account. I'm not gonna show you
that because you don't need to see my details. M1 Borrow, is if you wanna use margin, which I recommend against, don't get yourselves involved in margin. They offer a rate of 3.5%. Again, if you sign up for
M1 Plus for $125 a year, you get better margin rate. You get that second
trading window and you get a few other features as well. Then again, if we go over to research, that's where your pies
are that you have created, the expert pies, which
we looked at earlier. You can set up a watch
list of stocks or funds that you wanna track. You can see the list of funds available here in M1 Finance. They have just about everything
you could possibly want. Same with stocks, the whole list of stocks
that you can invest in. I don't know how limited they are. I think they have pretty much everything, correct me in the comments if I'm wrong. And then they have some
general market news, things like that. Or you can search on a
specific stock and get the news on that. So, pretty standard, pretty
straightforward stuff there. So, you can see the app is pretty clean. It's pretty straightforward to use. There's not a lot of hidden menus or cluttered design into it. I really like it. It's easy to use. I can automate my investing. That's why I love M1 Finance. Again, if you wanna try it out, you can sign up using the
link in the description below. If you wanna check out
what the different pies. I have created an M1 Finance
with I will link those in the description as well. In the meantime, check out these
two videos right over here. I hope you enjoy them. Thanks for watching.
