Investing With Technology
Investing can be difficult to understand, hard to start, and expensive to participate in. Over the last decade, numerous companies and technologies have come out to aid in this area. Here are a few companies that excel in helping investors:
- Robinhood – is an inexpensive way to start investing by charging $0 commission per trade. Also, it does not charge any fees for maintaining an account to transferring funds to an account.
- Betterment – this company has come out as a leader in the FinTech world. The fee charged by Betterment is .25% of assets. You also have personalized advice available and can sync outside accounts to view all your investments from one location. Betterment’s philosophy is low-cost index investing. In short, you will invest in stock and/or bond index funds. By doing so, you will beat the majority of active funds and also pay much less in expenses than those funds.
- Acorns – this company has gained popularity by rounding up everyday purchases to the nearest dollar amount and investing the difference into your Acorns account. For example, you buy something for $2.45 with a debit or credit card, Acorns will round that purchase up and invest the excess $.55 into your account. Acorns is inexpensive to use at only $1 per month. Once you reach or exceed $5,000 in your account, the fee changes to .25% of assets.
- Openfolio – this FinTech company was created to give investors a more accurate benchmark. Historically, if you invested in the stock market, the performance of your investments would be compared to the performance of the S&P 500. Openfolio creates a network of investors and compares the performance of your portfolio with the performance of a similar investor’s portfolio while keeping your information portfolio private. Based on the performance comparison, Openfolio will also show what you have done right and wrong in order to help future performance.
- FeeX – this is designed to reduce a number of fees you pay. FeeX will analyze all of your investments and figure out where you can reduce your fees. It will then find investments comparable to what you currently have, but are less expensive.
- StockTwits – provides a social network, of sorts, for investors. The site provides market research and analysis. It also enables investors of any level to communicate and discuss markets, individual stocks, and the economy.
- Dividend Reinvestment Plan (DRIP) – if you buy a stock, ETF, mutual fund, or an index fund, and that investment pays out a dividend, you can pick that dividend to automatically buy more of that investment upon payout. Not a company or a new technology, but DRIP is an extremely useful tool when building wealth.
Conclusion
Finance and technology in this day and age are synonymous. Financial companies are taking advantage of all the technology they have available to improve customer satisfaction. In addition, each year there are new financial technology companies coming out that seek to provide the best tools and techniques at the lowest cost possible. FinTech is incredibly important, and I think we have yet to see the best out of this young, new industry.
Photo: Tricky Enough
Jacob G. Sensiba is a third generation Registered Representative/Investment Advisor Representative at CRG Financial Services, Inc., Having grown up surrounded by wealth management. He is a licensed Registered Representative for the states of Wisconsin, Nebraska, Arizona, and Virginia. He is a licensed Investment Advisor Representative for Wisconsin. Jacob is a husband, father and self-confessed finance nerd. In spare time he enjoys family, golf, travel and personal finance.
You can also read his other articles at The Free Financial Advisor
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