- So today in this video we're gonna be covering the
top three free investing apps that you might be interested in in 2019. Now I have done probably I
would say 40 to 50 hours total of research on all these
different investing platforms. I have countless videos
on my YouTube channel reviewing these investing platforms. I have my Investing Simple blog where we go into more detail. So if you guys are looking
for more information about any of these three or
any other investing platforms, the playlist for those reviews
is in the description below. I also wanna be completely
transparent with you guys. I believe honesty is the best policy. I am affiliated with two
of these recommendations. I will mention that as I go. So the links in the description
below that I provide are affiliate links. You guys don't have to use
them if you don't want to but understand that if
you do use those links it certainly does help me out. It's a way to give me a
little bit of kickback here for the research that
went into this video. So that is an option available to you if you guys wanna support
me just by using a link. Those are provided as a convenience if you guys are interested. But we're gonna be covering three different free investing apps. They are for US-based investors only. I'm gonna go ahead and mention that now. I don't wanna waste anyone's time. But each of these three
platforms are very different. They're gonna be suitable for
a different type of investor and I'm gonna do my best
to help you guys understand where you should land and we're actually gonna be
opening up the app on my phone, that way I can show you
guys what they look like and give you an idea of the
platform and the user interface. That's been something
that's been requested in a lot of my other review videos. But starting off at number one is an M1 Finance, a very
popular new brokerage. M1 Finance is basically
if you could picture combining a robo advisor with
your traditional brokerage which basically allows you to automate the entire investing process. You can automate your deposits, build your portfolio or
your Pie as they call it, and automatically be
contributing to this portfolio from your account if you wanna
set it all up automatically. So that being said, M1
Finance, in my opinion is best for passive, long-term investors. If you're a short-term trader who's looking to buy and sell stocks, that's gonna be the next
platform that's best for you and if you guys wanna skip ahead, I'll include timestamps
down below as well. But if you're looking to
be a passive, long-term, set-it-and-forget-it type investor but you also wanna be more
active with your selection, M1 Finance in my opinion
is a great choice here because of the features that they offer and I also believe it is
a very suitable pick here for dividend investors because
they have a form of a DRIP where your dividends are reinvested back into your whole portfolio. One important thing to note here is that it's not a traditional DRIP where that dividend is gonna
go right back into that stock. It's gonna go into your
portfolio as a whole and be allocated according
to what you set there. So if you have 50% Apple, 50% Google, and then you know Apple
spits off that dividend, that dividend is gonna go
back into your portfolio but half of that's gonna go into Apple, half is gonna go into Google. It won't go 100% into Apple
so it's a little bit different than your traditional
dividend reinvestment plan. But that being said, here
are the pros of M1 Finance. Number one, it's free, all these are free. So we can write that one
right off the bat here. You're not paying anything in commissions to work with these companies. A lot of them offer above-and-beyond
services like M1 Borrow or any kind of margin
trading or investing. That's how they're making money. Second of all, fractional shares. M1 Finance is the only free
platform I've come across that allows you to buy
fractional shares of a stock. So let's say you wanna go out there and you wanna buy Amazon but you don't have
$1,000 or more to invest. You can buy as little
as 1/10,000 of a share of Amazon stock on this platform,
allowing you to buy Amazon even if you don't have
over $1,000 to invest. That is one of the strongest
suits here of M1 Finance is that fractional shares feature. Other than that, you can automate the
entire investing process through M1 Finance,
automate contributions, automate the process of investing. So it's great for passive,
set-it-and-forget-it investors. M1 Finance will also automatically
rebalance your portfolio as you contribute. So let's say you have a 50/50
split of Apple and Google and Apple goes to the
moon and all of a sudden you're lookin' at 60/40 where
60% of your money is in Apple, 40% is in Google. As you add more money
it's gonna go into Google so that way you get back
to that 50/50 balance, which means that M1 Finance
is automatically buying low on your behalf and as
I'm sure you guys know, money is made through the stock market by buying low and selling high. On that point, if you do withdraw money
from your M1 finance account they're gonna automatically
sell what you are overweight in or whatever investment is high. So it's automatically
buying low and selling high on your behalf. The other pro for M1 finance
is that they offer Expert Pies. I'm gonna show you guys
what those look like when we open up the app. And these are Expert Pies created
by professional investors. And this is one of the only
free brokerages I've seen that offers this professional
level of guidance completely for free where you can invest in these pre-built
portfolios or if you want to you can build your own
custom Pie or portfolios. The other pro is that M1 Finance is one
of the only free platforms that offers retirement accounts and then also they have
tax-efficient selling. So when you take money out of your account they're going to sell in the most tax efficient manner possible hoping to reduce your tax
bill at the end of the year. Alright, so now let's go
ahead and open up M1 Finance and take a look at this
app so you can decide whether or not it's for you. Okay, so the first thing
we notice about this app is that it is a very, very simple and easy to understand user interface. I just created an account. I didn't go through anything else 'cause I wanted to show you
guys what you're gonna see on your end when you sign up and if you guys are ready to get started there is a link in the description below. It's an affiliate link,
you don't have to use it but it certainly does help me out. So the first thing you're gonna do is create your portfolio
then you create your profile. You have to give them your
social security number for tax reasons and identity verification and then you're going
to fund your portfolio. So I wanna show you guys
what this process looks like. So this walks you through it here. "Welcome to M1. "This is your portfolio,
the simple tool you will use "to manage your investments." As you can see, and what you can do here you can put your own individual
stocks in these Pies, you can put an Expert Pie within a Pie. There is so much
customization you can do here with M1 Finance. And you can also have
multiple different Pies if you wanna have one for
your growth investments, one for your income
investments, one for retirement. There are multiple different Pies. There's an unlimited number of Pies and you can put up to
100 different investments into each Pie. And as far as what
investments are available, you can invest in any ETFs or stocks that trade on both the
New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ that can
go into your portfolio and the best part here is the
amount of customization here. So I'm gonna go ahead and
create a Pie for you guys just to show you guys how this works. So first of all, we can
see the most popular stocks or the stocks being sorted
here by market capitalization. So let's say I wanted to
add Apple to my portfolio. I'll hit that plus button
and that's gonna be, later on I can do the allocation. So let's say I wanna do Apple,
I also wanna add JP Morgan, and let's say I wanna add Walmart, and that's gonna be my individual
stocks within this Pie. Then I can go over here and look at Funds. This is where you can pick your ETFs. Let's say you want to
invest in the Vanguard ETFs. Here's one of the most popular ones, VOO, the Vanguard S&P 500 Index Fund. You can add that right to
your Pie if you want to. So this is where you're
gonna do your ETFs. On the left here, that's where you're gonna
pick the stocks you want in your portfolio, and then
over here are the Expert Pies. Again, a completely free very,
very useful feature here. So first of all, let's say you wanna look
at general investing Pies and this tells you exactly what they are. These Pies are ideal for those who want a broad
market exposure at low cost, want to choose a portfolio
based on their risk tolerance, are looking to build
a portfolio over time. That would be for very
passive, ETF investors. Plans for Retirement, you
can do retirement investing with target date funds. Now I'm not gonna go through all of these. You guys can do this on
your own through the app but you can see there are
all kinds of different funds. One of my favorite ones
here on the Expert Pies is the Hedge Fund Followers, you can actually follow
big funds out there. So if you wanna replicate what
Berkshire Hathaway is doing you can add that to your portfolio. If you like Carl Icahn, you
can follow Icahn Capital. There are all kinds of different ones. You can see Pershing Square as well, all kinds of different
funds and hedge funds. You can replicate exactly
what they're doing completely free through M1 Finance. So I accidentally deleted
my Pie by accident so let me go ahead and select
my stocks one more time and then I'll show you
guys what that looks like. So let's say we wanna do
Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and we also want to put some money into the Vanguard 500 fund, that's gonna be my four
selections for this Pie. Then I go ahead and click Done. So now this is where I
decide how much of my money is gonna go into each stock? Well, just for this portfolios, and this is not a real portfolio, let's say I wanna put 50% of my money into the Vanguard 500 Fund. I wanna then put 10% into Microsoft. I then wanna put 10% into Apple but I also really think Amazon is gonna do exceptionally well so I'm gonna put 30% into Amazon. I have now created an M1 Finance Pie. Every dollar that goes
into this portfolio; 30%'s gonna go to Amazon, 10%
to Apple, 10% to Microsoft, 50% to the Vanguard 500 Fund. That is when you're gonna hit Save, it's gonna save that Pie for you. Next step is gonna be
to create your profile. This is where M1 Finance is separate from other
investment options out there because you can do an
individual investing account, joint investing account,
retirement account, trust account, all kinds of different options. And this is the point where I'm gonna stop because I already have
my own M1 Finance account but if you decide to
do individual investing you'll just click on that,
fill out your information, and then eventually fund that account and whatever amount of
money you've put in there it's gonna be spread based
on the portfolio you create. Okay, so the second free
app that might interest you as an investor is a newer
brokerage called Webull and this is a great
platform, in my opinion, for the intermediate active trader. So this is somebody who might be more active
with their selection. They're intermediate,
they're not a beginner. So they're looking for a more
research-oriented platform. In my opinion, Webull is
the best platform for you and Webull also has a
great promotion going on where if you open an account with them you do not even have to fund the account. Just by opening an account they're gonna send you a
free stock worth up to $1,000 but in order to get that you guys do have to use my affiliate link in the description below. So if you wanna get that free stock you gotta do it through my link or somebody else's affiliate link. But if you are opening
an account with Webull make sure you are taking advantage of this so you can get your free stock. This is what I believe to be
the strong points of Webull. First of all, it is one
of the only free platforms that I've come across that have a lot of technical indicators. I believe they have 30
different technical indicators you can use to perform technical
analysis of your investments. They also have a financial
calendar I'm gonna show you guys in a little bit. They offer commission-free short selling. They are the only
brokerage I've come across that offers this. They offer free extended hours trading if you wanna trade pre and post market and they're also a
research-oriented platform. Now that being said, this is a platform that
might not be the best pick for beginners because it could be like putting your mouth up to a
fire hose to get a drink. It might be so overwhelming
that it's just too much for you and if that's the case,
platform number three is probably going to be
the best pick for you. But if you've already been investing then this might be a good upgrade for you where you're gonna get more research tools and you can grab a completely
free stock as well. But let's go ahead and open up the app and see what we think of this platform. Okay, so first of all,
what you're noticing here is there's a lot of different
things you can do with Webull. We have the watch lists. You can click over here
and you can get an update on what the markets are doing. You can see what are the
biggest movers in the market, hot sectors, top ETFs, an idea of what the
indexes are doing overall. You can get global market
data up here as well. If you wanna see the
United Kingdom, Germany, different indices, FOREX, Crypto. There is so much available to you here. Wow, Bitcoin is up huge. I didn't even know that. I've been keeping an eye on it. But there is so much
available to you here. Some people open up this app and they go, what am I looking at? I am so overwhelmed here. But if you know what you're
doing in the market already there is so much information
available to you, Webull can really be a
one-stop shop for you. So this is pretty much what
they're offering you here. They're showing you the
star stocks of this market, the biggest movers, market
gainers, market losers, market actives, the most
actively traded stocks here. We see GE, AMD, BAC,
Apple all actively trading at this point in time. What mutual funds are
moving, what FOREX is moving. So much information available to you. Over here you can see your deposits if you have any deposits with Webull. This is the free stock that
I got by opening my account. It was ABEV which I believe
is American Beverage, or something like that. So I got a free stock worth
five bucks at that point in time for pretty much doing nothing, just opening an account with them. Over here you can get different streams. This is where you get news streams. So if you wanna follow different stocks you can get news updates
on them, 24/7 news here. You can do certain markets if you wanna follow certain markets, you can get business news,
technology, commodities. Anything you're looking
for, I'm telling you guys it's somewhere here within this app. It is, Webull was originally actually just a research platform and then they merged into
a full-blown brokerage. So picture a brilliant research platform combined with a brokerage
account and then you get Webull, that is what we have here. And then over here on the Explore, that is where you can look at a lot of different things here. They have screeners, they
have the financial calendar which I'll go ahead and open up. It's telling you what companies
are reporting earnings. You can also look at paper trading. They have this, this is one
of my favorite parts here of this app is you can do paper trading with $1,000,000 of fake money if you want to practice investing without using any real money,
which I think is a great idea. You can do that right here within Webull with that paper trading feature. They also offer global market data if you wanna follow global markets. What I will say is if you're looking for
certain levels of quotation you have to pay for
these on a subscription. So this right here is how
Webull's making money. Let's say you wanted to get access to TSX, Toronto Stock Exchange here level one. You pay 4.99 a month or 53.99 per year. Most people don't need this stuff but if you're looking to buy it, that is how Webull is making money if you were curious about that. You can look at US ETFs here. You can look at earnings
to see which companies are beating earnings and
having earning surprises. Okay, so we opened up the page
here for General Electric. Up top we have the share price and as you can see we
have a price chart here showing us how the stock is trading. Candlestick view is at the bottom and you can add technical
indicators to this as well if you want to take a look
at any of these indicators that you're interested in. I'll show you guys how
to do that in a second. Over here on the right you get
an update on the news here. GE stock falls, or fails
to hold another lead. Heads for 20th decline in 23 sessions. Press releases here by General Electric. Over here we get analyst recommendations. This is the Institutional Analyst Rating. Strong Buy, Buy, Hold,
Under-Perform, Sell, recommendation trends, analyst
price targets, EPS estimates. You can get ideas of
support and resistance areas with the stock. So much information available to you more than I can even cover in one review. Over here on Financials you can look at the income
statements, the balance sheet, the cash flow statements, get charting of all of this different stuff. So much data is available to you. Again, this is why some
people look at this and they're just completely overwhelmed. So if you're a complete
beginner, our next pick is going to be probably
a better choice for you. And over here as far as the profile goes, overview of the company,
officers and directors, and this is one of the best
parts in my opinion too, insider trading activity. You can see insiders of the company, whether they are buying or selling shares. We see here that Larry Culp picked up 225,000 shares recently, might be a good indicator
there of a trend reversal. So you can get all kinds of data, whatever you're looking for
it's available here for you within the Webull app and you
can look at the trend here, what are people doing? Are most people increasing
shares, decreasing shares, or holding onto shares. Just so much data available to
you here with the Webull app. You can go here and you can
add it to your watch list, you can have different watch lists, you can set price alerts through the app, you can add notes here if you wanna take notes on this company as far as what your
thoughts and opinions are. So much you can do within the Webull app. Completely free and you get a free stock just for opening an account, so it's a pretty awesome
deal there in my opinion. Okay, and then the third
and final app we have here is one that most people are familiar with, most people are probably already using it, that is Robinhood. In my opinion, this is good
for the beginner active trader, somebody who's looking
to actively trade stocks on maybe a daily or a weekly basis. Now if you're day trading, I wouldn't day trade with Robinhood, you'll get in trouble with
pattern day trader requirements. But if you're trading
maybe once or twice a week or something like that
and you're a beginner, Robinhood might be a good choice for you and this is where Robinhood
is strong in my opinion. First of all, in certain states they offer cryptocurrencies for free, for free trading of cryptocurrencies. They also offer free options trading and that's what separates them from their other two peers here. And then where they're also strong is the fact that they have a very simple, easy-to-follow interface and it's extremely beginner friendly. So let's go ahead and open the app here and Robinhood is not a
company I'm affiliated with so I don't have a link for them. You can just download
that from the app store. Okay, so first of all what
you're seeing on my screen here is saying my account has been closed. I ended up transferring my Robinhood over to my other brokerage account. So you guys wouldn't
see that on your screen, you would see something else entirely. But this is the homepage of Robinhood. Down below here we get a watch list of
the most popular stocks. You can search them up
here in the top right, get an idea of the top
movers in the market. Popular collections here if you wanna look at the
hundred most popular stocks, upcoming earnings, these stocks
are reporting earnings soon. All kinds of different tags here and collections of stocks you can look at. Recent news here, get an idea of ya know
different news articles here if you're lookin' to learn
about different investments. They have a nice news feature. But really what we're getting at here is that Robinhood is a very simple app. Over here on the left, this is where if you wanna do free stocks. You can invite friends, you'll each get a free stock I believe. So that's an option
available to you as well. You can upgrade if you
want to get Robinhood Gold, there's some features
that go along with that but when I used Robinhood
I just used the basic plan and it was certainly enough for me. But let's just go ahead
and search up a stock just so I can show you guys what we have. We'll do GE since we did that one before. Take a look at General Electric and right now it's showing me
the candlestick price chart. If you wanna switch back, it's
just this button right here if you wanna switch between
getting that candlestick view or just your regular price chart. But that is as far as the
charting goes on Robinhood. It's not very sophisticated. You can get a lot more technical data over on that Webull app and you can obviously look
at different timeframes here to see how this company
has been doing overall and the answer is pretty poorly
overall, looking at this. General statistics about this company. News, analyst ratings as well. So you're gonna see
some similar stuff here to what's available on Webull but it's just a much simpler app here. You can see it's
definitely not for ya know, somebody who is intermediate or advanced, it's gonna be a little too basic for you but if you're a complete beginner, definitely a beginner-friendly app and so that is what Robinhood
has to offer for you. Okay, but anyways guys, that's
gonna wrap up this video. Those are, in my opinion, the top three free investing apps available in 2019. If you guys want to grab
that free stock from Webull that is in the description below. I also have a link for M1 Finance if you guys are interested. Again, you don't have to use
'em if you don't want to, it just helps me out and
helps support my channel and gives me some kickback
for doing the research and creating these videos. But let me know if you
guys have any questions, I'll do my best to answer them down in the comments section below. But thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video.
