Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links where I may receive a small commission at no cost to you if you decide to sign up and invest. These are investing platforms I fully recommend when it comes to investing.

With M1 Finance, you can own any stock for as little as $1. This is especially beneficial for stocks that have high share prices because anybody can own a proportionate share. 

Amazon (AMZN) for example has a share price of over $3,000. You don’t need to buy a full share to get in on the growth. Even if have $3,000 to invest, you most likely don’t want to spend it all on one stock and would rather diversify your holdings.

Apple and Amazon are some of the greatest technology companies in the world but their share prices are pretty high. With M1 Finance, you don’t need to pay the entire share price to take a claim at ownership, you just have to invest a small amount.

A common trend among investing apps today is the ability to trade stocks for free and M1 Finance is no different. Buying and selling stock, bonds, and ETFs are completely free. 

Along with no trade fees, there are no asset management fees. Gone are the days of paying managers to manage your money, M1 Finance allows you to do it yourself. 

By not paying any fees, you can use that money to reinvest which could leave you with thousands of dollars in the long run. 

M1 Finance has a unique feature that allows investors to rebalance their portfolios with the click of a single button.

In order to keep your portfolio from drifting away from your target allocation, you will need to rebalance it from time to time.

Say for example you set Apple to be 5% of your total portfolio. If it overperforms it will be overweight, if underperforming it will be underweight. Over time, if you have many stocks, your portfolio allocation will drift further away from your target.

If you have any investment goals in the future, portfolio drift can have an impact.

You have the option to automatically reinvest your dividends back into your portfolio. When you receive a dividend, the amount will be deposited into your cash balance. This is known as a dividend reinvestment plan (DRIP). 

Once your cash balance reaches $25, it will automatically be reinvested back into your portfolio. You can toggle this on and off at any time.

Staying organized is incredibly important in investing because you want to see how your portfolio is allocated. M1 Finance creates an amazing visualization tool for investors by introducing their unique pie features.

Pies allow you to organize the stocks in your portfolio based on how you want to. Imagine your overall portfolio as a pie. You may have 40 different stocks from different types of industries. With all those stocks, you can create pies to organize your holdings. 

Check out my M1 Finance pie to get a visual of how slices work.

You can create pies for technology companies, consumer goods, finance, industrial, or anything you want! This method is really beneficial because you can set target allocations based on the type of sectors you want to invest in.

Webull offers some pretty amazing and advanced indicators to track stocks. Moving averages, overbought/oversold indicators, and various oscillators leave investors at no shortage of market insight.

All of the tools on Webull allow beginner investors to take the next step and become intermediate or even advanced investors.

If you don’t have the actual money to spend but still want to get experience trading, then you can utilize the “Paper Trading” feature on Webull. This is fake money you can use to test your investing skills.

Webull offers free trading for stocks, ETFs, and options just like most other brokerages on this list. In the long-run, money saved with Webull can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

When it comes to investing apps, Robinhood is one of the easiest to use.

The user interface is very simplistic and easy to understand for beginners.

Additionally, there are very helpful news articles giving you up-to-date information on the economy and stock market.

Easily trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, and a few other prominent cryptos.

Currently, Robinhood offers trading for 7 cryptocurrencies but they will most likely add more as time goes on. Click here if you want to see which cryptocurrencies Robinhood currently offers.

With a 24/7 market, you can trade crypto at all hours of the day. Just be warned, crypto is very volatile so trade at your own risk.

Robinhood recently introduced fractional share investing which is a huge bonus to investors who don’t want to pay the entire price for stocks. Stocks like Tesla, Amazon, and Alphabet have large share prices and may not be feasible for everybody to purchase an entire share.

Robinhood allows investors to purchase any stock at 1/1,000,000 of the price, meaning anybody can own any stock with a small amount of money.

Even by just owning a small portion of Tesla or Amazon, you can ride along for the journey.

Robinhood was one of the first brokerages to offer free trading and no management fees. They disrupted the investing market which has caused other brokerages to follow suit.

According to nerdwallet, the average trading fee ranges from $3-7 per trade! Imagine saving those trading fees and investing them back into your portfolio.

Luckily with Robinhood and many of the other brokerages on this list, you don’t have to worry. Free trading and no management fees are here to stay!

Ally Invest doesn’t require any minimum investment to get started. Regardless of how much cash you have, Ally opens their arms and welcomes you to their platform.

Investing can be overwhelming and scary for beginners and they may not want to invest a lot of money initially. Luckily, Ally Invest gives anybody the flexibility to get started.

There is no shortage of investment options on Ally. You can trade stocks, bonds, ETFs, options, mutual funds, and forex.

The wide array of investment types makes Ally a good platform for advanced traders.

Having an Ally bank account to complement the Ally Invest account will make things a little easier. You can move money across your Ally accounts easier and quicker than if sending money from other banks.

Apart from this, Ally’s bank account has historically yielded higher interest compared to other banks. If you want to earn higher yields without investing, Ally is an good all-around option.

Ally Invest is yet another investing app with no trading or management fees. The importance of this can’t be overstated because investors can save thousands in the long run by not paying any fees.

The analytical tools available on TD Ameritrade are off the charts. When searching for a stock, there is a really nice summary page showing current price, dividend yield, ex-dividend date, next dividend payout date, P/E ratio, and beta just to name a few.

There are additional tabs that provide insane amounts of other information. The news tab shows all the current market updates surrounding the holding. You can create charts with some really nice features such as adding a linear regression line and all past dividend payouts.

Another nice tool TD Ameritrade comes equipped with is showing other analysts’ view of the stock. Although it is all just speculation, it is nice to get an understanding of how other financial companies rate a particular stock.

Beginners and intermediate investors can learn using TD Ameritrade’s education feature within the app. There are educational videos on margin calls, options, and basic stock investing videos targeted towards beginners.

Investors can also watch “how-to” videos on learning about the TD Ameritrade application and all the features that are provided. Learn about the in-depth dashboard and get a nice overview of the charts by just watching a few short videos.

Taxes suck, period. Although there is no way to avoid taxes, there are ways to minimize them. TD Ameritrade’s tax-loss harvesting feature does a daily check of your portfolio and looks for ways to minimize the taxes.

TD Ameritrade will take any gains you have and find ways to offset them with any potential losses. This can substantially reduce your taxes at the end of the year leaving you with even more money to invest.

TD Ameritrade has no fees associated with stocks, ETFs, and options. No fees are the new normal and TD Ameritrade has adapted nicely leaving investors with more money at the end of the day.

Acorns invests the spare change from everyday purchases. Say for example you purchase a coffee for $1.50 using your debit or credit card. Acorns will automatically round up your purchase to $2 where the $1.50 will go to the coffee company and the remaining 50 cents will get invested into your Acorns portfolio.

The beauty of Acorn’s business model is that it allows anybody to get involved with investing by living their everyday life. Only a few cents are getting invested per transaction into relatively safe portfolios. It is very reassuring to know that every time you make a purchase, you are also investing.

Are you interested in investing with companies focused on the environment, social responsibility, and governance? Acorns has multiple portfolios focused on these aspects based on their environment, social, and governance (ESG) rating.

There are four ESG portfolios ranging from moderately conservative to aggressive. Depending on your risk tolerance, you can choose whichever portfolio you are comfortable with.

Acorns is extremely hands-off because it does all the work for you. No need to pick individual stocks and perform technical analysis. The only thing you have to do is select one of Acorn’s five expertly created portfolios ranging from conservative (bond oriented) to aggressive (stock oriented).

Once your card is linked and you have chosen your portfolio based on your risk preference, your spare change will get invested after every purchase you make. After some time you most likely won’t even remember your portfolio and log in one day to find a huge pile of cash waiting for you.

Acorns charges $3 per month for individuals and $5 per month if you want to open additional accounts for your family.

Unlike other investing apps on this list, trading isn’t applicable for Acorns because that is not the intent behind this platform. The intent is to grow a portfolio of many different stocks and bonds.