It must have a place for your investing style and contains the various tools that will help you to reach your goals, including educational guides and/or courses, human advisor access, and great customer support.
Best Investment Apps for BeginnersCompare Top Investment Apps for Beginners
Below is a list of the best investment apps for beginners that Business Insider editors have chosen in 2024.
Best for: All beginners
With its user-friendly interface and rock-bottom pricing, Sofi is one of the best investment apps for beginners. You can get started at SoFi Invest with just $1, and there are no commissions for trades; no recurring account fees are charged. Even the managed portfolio product of SoFi automated investing, where your ETFs are all picked and managed for you, has absolutely no cost.
You can then sorts through potential investments by categorizing different stocks and ETFs. Outside of the app, all SoFi members have free financial planning, among other additional perks. You'll be working with certified financial planners who can help you achieve your goals.
If you are an absolute beginner and you'd like a little guidance on how you should put together an investment strategy, SoFi is not a bad place to get started.
Cons: SoFi doesn't offer automatic tax-loss harvesting.
SoFi Invest Review
Acorns is an investment app for people who know they should be investing but don't have or want to spend the time to manage it themselves. For $3 per month, Acorns will take care of everything. That includes automatic spare change investing through transaction round-ups, automated transfers, retirement account savings, banking perks, and a fully automated investment plan.
Invest your money in a well-diversified portfolio of low-cost ETFs that match your risk tolerance, goals, and time horizon. Acorns offer you a chance to invest in either its Core portfolios or ESG portfolios.
Big upside: Acorns is super-easy to use. Big downside: There's a fee no matter what. Arguably, this is better than asset-based fee deductions that go up and up as your balance grows. You know exactly what you'll pay in month-to-month fees every year. You'll also pay $9 a month extra for accounts and features, including investment accounts for kids.
Cons: You won't be able to select individual investments with Acorns unless you pay extra.
Beginners tend to do well with simple investment platforms. You get just that with Ally Invest through the mobile app investment app best for beginners. You can trade stocks, ETFs, and options with no commissions.
Plus, if you prefer the robo-advisor route more, then Ally Invest Robo Portfolios creates a personalized portfolio of ETFs for you. Within the application, there are two robo-portfolio options available: the cash-enhanced portfolio or the market-focused portfolio. In general, the Ally Invest mobile app is relatively easy to work with, featuring several easy-to-access investment tools like market screeners, performance charts, stock analytics, and a Smart Score ranking.
Cash-Enhanced Portfolios take 30% of your asset allocations and set it aside into an interest-earning cash buffer for no additional advisory fee. The market-focused portfolios use about 2% of your portfolio as a cash buffer and carries an advisory fee of 0.30%.
If you're more of a hands-on investor, beginners will also have the option to open a self-directed trading account with no account minimum or market access 24/7. With that, you can tailor your portfolio with hand-selected stocks, ETFs, options, bonds, mutual funds, and low-priced securities.
Cons: Ally Invest does offer wealth management services, but you'll need at least $100,000 to get started.
Public
Best for: Socially responsible investing
When one is starting to invest in the stock market, the research and picking of stocks and other investments can be an overwhelming job. Public merges features of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter with traditional brokerage features, making it an ideal investment app for beginners to learn their way through the markets.
You can learn about other experts' portfolios by following their posts on the Public feed, creating group chats with other users, and participating in live investing events and conversations. You can invest in more than two dozen different cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, dogecoin, and ether.
Starting with fractional shares, most supported companies can be bought into without tying up enough money to buy a full share. Alternative assets via art, NFTs, collectibles, and more for 2.5% per transaction.
Cons: Without offering each and every popular type of investment, Public has coverage over stocks and ETFs. That can be great for newer or seasoned investors aiming to improve their investment strategy.
If you're a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, or relative looking to help a kid understand how the stock market works, Stockpile can meet all your needs. It makes gifting stock and keeping tabs on the account of a minor that much easier. It even makes it fun to navigate through supported stocks while educating the users through "mini-lessons" on how to invest.
A membership gets access to one adult account, five kids' accounts, 4000+ stocks and ETFs, among others, for just $4.95 per month. You can opt for a free trial for up to 30 days to see if Stockpile is a good fit for your family.
Investment Apps for Beginners
Investing apps make the stock market much less intimidating and more accessible to their consumers than traditional trading. Most investment applications offer seamless user experiences, relatively low trading fees, and a library of educational content to learn about while investing money.
The Glamour of Investment Apps to New Investors
Investment applications attract new investors now due to their simplicity and affordability. Most of the beginner-friendly investment applications have noteworthy features such as the diversification of the portfolio with ease, commission-free trading, and simple investment strategies.
Most of the investment applications for beginners have a mobile and web platform to increase accessibility. Users can thus trade anywhere and track their investments.
Some investment apps, designed for more novice investors, offer a different, advanced platform which offers customized dashboards, other higher-risk investment options, and charting tools suitable for sophisticated investors. That's particularly handy for people who are interested in growing their trading skills alongside their investment platform.
Features to Look for in an Investment App for Beginners
The features that one should look out for while comparing investment apps, if a beginner is to get the best app, include comparisons of different investment apps as a starter. The best investment app-irrespective of the experience-level-depends on your preference regarding investment style and options and also risk tolerance.
Having said that, the usually desired top rounding features in an investment app for a beginner are educational resources, investment tools, and many more.
Educational Resources and Investment Tools
A library of guides, explainers, and other educational content is crucial in growing your trading skills as a new investor. Most investment apps have information blog posts on a variety of subjects. The best investment platform for beginners will provide users with expertly-crafted content and tutorials specially designed for people using their platform.
Such educational resources, combined with user-friendly trading tools, are vital in helping learners grasp the basics of investing and come up with their own ways through which they can build their money in the long run.
Ease of Use
A friendly trading platform is one of the most crucial points that a beginning investor needs. The investment platform should be intuitive and easy to use; investors need not get confused by anything on the platform, as they are still learning the trade. It opens up clean and cohesive grounds that are both accessible and allow new investors to make proper and informed decisions about their investments without feeling overwhelmed by how intricate the market can be.
BEGINNER INVESTMENT APPS FAQs
Those new to investing can get a start with an investment app for beginners or a beginner-friendly brokerage account. There are typically few associated costs with novice investment apps: Most robo-advisors trade primarily in low-cost ETFs.
Some of the best investments for beginners include exchange-traded funds, low-cost index funds, and a mix of corporate bonds and other fixed-income securities. The best investments for you will vary depending on your age, how near or far you are from retirement, and your risk tolerance.
You can get a start with several of the top trading platforms without much money. Some investment platforms will let you invest a small sum-as little as $1-into fractional shares of stocks. One of those investment platforms is SoFi Invest.
Why You Should Trust Us: Our Methodology
For beginners, it's all about finding an investment app that is easy to get started with and combines low cost with features most important to them. Whether one looks into building a passive portfolio of funds or an active portfolio of stocks, or whatever investment strategy there is for this matter, there is an online brokerage and investment app created just for you. Beginner investment platforms are rated on a scale from 1 through 5.
To make our picks, we leveraged Business Insider's investing platform ranking methodology to center our focus on costs and fees, app features, types of accounts available, investment products available, and beginner-friendly features that let you manage your investment account on the go.
Tessa Campbell
Investing and Retirement Reporter
Tessa Campbell is an investing and retirement reporter on Business Insider's personal finance desk. In over two years of personal finance reporting, Tessa has developed a personal finance expertise in everything from the best credit cards to the best retirement savings accounts for each kind of saver. Experience Currently, Tessa reports on all things investing-deep-diving into complex financial topics in order to shed light on the less-well-known investment avenues and uncover ways that readers can work the system in their favor. Being a personal finance expert in her 20s, Tessa is keenly aware of the impacts that time and uncertainty have on one's investment decisions. While she curates Business Insider's guide to the best investment apps, she believes a perfect financial portfolio is not needed- it just needs to exist. Something is better than nothing, and the mistakes one makes are an important part of learning. Expertise: Tessa's expertise includes:
Investing apps
Retirement savings
Cryptocurrency
The stock market
Retail investing
