The 5 Best Investing Apps for Beginners

The 5 Best Apps To Begin Your Investing Journey

Beginning your journey as an investor can be a daunting experience. There are so many ways to invest it can be nearly impossible to know where to start, and many people can get stuck in analysis paralysis.

Luckily, many apps can now assist you in learning, experimenting, and safely investing in traditional or alternative financial opportunities. These apps can optimize your investment strategy and remove the burden of extensive research and decision-making.

This article will review some noteworthy investment apps that can make your life easier and help you meet your financial goals.

Best Investing Apps To Download On Your Mobile Phone

This list features apps from fintech disruptors that can help you invest your money and visualize your financial future. They each offer different services to help young investors learn, grow, and begin their investing journey. 

Invstr

• Learn About Investing
• Gamified Experience
• Available Via Mobile App

Invstr is an excellent app for beginners. When you combine learning, real-life investment, and community into an app, you get Invstr. This app helps new investors get into stocks with a gamified interface and user experience. The app incorporates a fantasy trading game in which you can manage a virtual fund worth $200 billion. You also get access to professional opinions on stocks and other investments.

The fantasy game provides you with $1 million in virtual cash. To create your investing strategy, you can get inspiration and ideas from the app's social network and news feed. On top of that, the month's best performers are now eligible for cash prizes. You can also purchase fractional and entire shares commission-free in the app if you'd like to transform any of your dreams picks into real-life stakes. In addition, you will be able to learn from a group of investors, understand why they go for specific stocks, and participate in a fun role-playing game.

Wealthfront

• High-yield savings account
• Free/low-cost, actively managed investment account
• Track your entire portfolio and project your savings into the future

Wealthfront has two types of accounts: a high-yield, FDIC-insured savings account, and an actively managed investment account. Both options are great for beginning investors. Wealthfront makes it easy to have a diversified portfolio without needing to do your own research or even check your investments very often.

Users can set up recurring deposits to make this a fully automated investing experience. On top of that, there are no fees associated with the savings account and no fees for investment accounts until users reach at least $5,000.

Wealthfront also allows you to connect external accounts and project your savings into the future, allowing you to see if your current investment strategy is on track for retirement.

Acorns

• Investment App for Savers
• Easy to Navigate
• Available Via Web and Mobile App

Acorns might be among the oldest of this new breed of financial apps, but it is still as good as they come. This app is one of the most popular finance apps available, mainly due to its simplicity and ease of use.

Saving with Acorns requires little more than setting up the app. After you attach a debit or credit card to your account, Acorns will round up your transactions to the next dollar and invest the difference in one of several ETF portfolios.

Acorns' basic account, Acorns Lite, costs $1 per month, while Acorns Personal offers a few more features for $3 per month. This slightly pricier package includes an individual retirement account (IRA), which you can do in one of three ways: standard, Roth, or SEP.

Acorns builds your portfolio based on how much time you have before you retire (calculated as age 59 ½). Then it gets increasingly conservative the closer you are to that age. It also includes an FDIC-insured checking account with no maintenance costs and fee-free access to tens of thousands of ATMs.

You can also acquire Acorns Family for $5 a month. This level contains all the functionalities of the first two packages and savings accounts for your children without any minimum account balance.

Outlet

• Seamless high-yield Investing with stablecoins
• Savings account-like Experience
• Available via mobile app

Outlet is a savings app that offers over *50x* the APY of a conventional savings account by leveraging the power of crypto. Outlet generates a return by converting your dollars into USDC, a fully backed and regularly audited stablecoin. Your USDC is then lent out via professional lending desks. However, as a user, you will notice this platform behaves and feels like a savings account. This is possible due to its user-friendly design that removes the complexity of investing in crypto. You see your account value reflected in USD, and you can deposit and withdraw to and from your bank anytime.

Outlet is free to use and doesn't charge any maintenance fees whatsoever. Furthermore, Outlet holds your funds with an SOC II Compliant custody partner to ensure your funds and data are always protected from hacks.

Robinhood

• Investment App for Easy Trading
• Seamless Interface
• Available Via Web and Mobile App

Robinhood may be the most well-known investing app for beginners. Of course, you might have heard about his app in 2021 due to its controversial role in the GameStop short squeeze, but media coverage is not what made this app so successful.

Robinhood offers seemingly endless trading options through an easy-to-navigate interface. You can trade stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptocurrency on Robinhood for free. The app makes what were once complicated investing tasks as easy as online shopping. This platform is so easy to use that you will feel like a pro in no time.

Robinhood also offers features such as analysis of individual stocks, including charts and relevant statistics. It also has a feed that gathers content from news and investing sites that can help you keep up with the overall financial market.

Robinhood doesn't require a minimum balance to open an account, and there are no fees for trading. They also offer a Gold membership with premium features.

It's worth noting that while Robinhood is essentially free, the app makes money with a 'cash for order flow' model, meaning they send their order book through Citadel, who uses the information to inform their own investment decisions. As a user, this model means you usually do not get the best price when you buy and sell through Robinhood. As a result, the company has drawn scrutiny from investing professionals and retail traders as a method of institutions extracting value from casual investors.

Should I Use All These Investing Apps?

Finding the right investment strategy and the apps to help you with it is a personal decision. First, you need to determine your goals, how knowledgeable you are about investing, and how much time you want to spend managing your finances.

Starting with an app like Investr can be a great way to practice investing without risking any actual money. Then, when you feel more comfortable, you can move to an investing app focused on savings, such as Wealthfront or Acorns. When you're ready to invest in stocks, it's always a good idea to start with a small amount of money you can afford to lose while you become familiar with the process. You can also choose a mix of actively managed accounts and apps like Robinhood that allow you to select individual stocks and ETFs.

The best finance apps for beginners boil down to what gives you the widest range of coverage and what you feel comfortable using. One thing is certain: you shouldn't leave your money around. The sooner you start investing, the sooner you will be comfortable, and the better your financial future is likely to be.