When it comes to investing apps, you have a ton of different options, but which one is the best to really get started with? Well, in this video, we're going to be going over the five most popular apps so you know which ones to get started with and which ones you might want to avoid. Starting with acorns, this app is super popular with beginners because of how simple it is. and I'm not just saying that without experience. I've personally used Acorns while still attending Community College and I just recently cashed out over thirty thousand dollars that I started from zero with All right.

So here's my Acorn account value and you'll notice that currently it's sitting at a thousand dollars. but before that I open this account back in 2018. this is when I deposited initially less than 15 into my account. it grew from that it had 30 bucks.

I Remember February 2019 it grew to a thousand dollars. This is a huge moment where I start to see a little bit more traction and through this account it just continued to grow even more. It's like a Little Acorn You know, like their company Acorn grown into a big oak tree. So we had 2021.

We had the crazy pandemic happening where all this stimulus helicopter money was flying around and the market propelled into the bull run. and that's when I saw my Acorns account grow even more significantly. we're at the peak I had thirty seven thousand dollars. Now it was about a month ago I decided to buy a new truck I Thought the market is not going to perform as well I made a rookie mistake I actually cashed out all of my positions here, moved it into my checking account waiting to reinvest, but if I kept that in I guarantee you this would have approached the 40 000 Mark and be way higher than that.

and I think it would have grown to over fifty thousand dollars by the end of this year. Hindsight's 2020. It is all good. We still have many other accounts to talk about, but this here is one of my favorite.

Just because Acorns was so hands off I didn't have to make any specific Investments this was all automatic and I would just check into it every month or so just to get a little bit of a dopamine Spike and just seeing how high it started to go up. What I love about Acorns is that you can set up automatic recurring Investments which is something that I did and then they would just go ahead and handle the rest for you. Acorns is also what I consider to be the best beginner friendly the app because it turns out if you didn't know an average, 84 percent of first-time investors end up losing money on their trades. To compare this account to something like my Robin Hood account where you know we're going crazy with the whole AMC thing, you know we're buying all these meme stocks.

Blackberry Nokia I actually was losing a lot of money during those times with my Acorns account because it was so hands off it kept going up this year. Can be a huge help in being profitable because Acorns will do all the research on which Investments are best for you and you can even go ahead and adjust what kind of investor are you? Do You want to be more aggressive or conservative just to weigh out even additional options and customizations within their app? Plus On top of that, they have that reoccurring investment features which allows you to utilize a strategy called dollar cost averaging which helps reduce risk and price fluctuations by investing at regular intervals over the long term. The way it works is Acorns automatically invests based on your risk profile into any money goals that you set. This could be automatic withdrawals from a checking account linked to your account, or you can also utilize a debit card that they offer you where it will round up to the nearest dollar amount on every transaction and invest the difference.

So if I go ahead and I buy a pack of gum for three dollars and 74 cents I could have it round up to five dollars and then it would invest that two dollars and change into my Acorns account. So for me on my debit card transaction, I Just see, you know, everything costs like five bucks. Six bucks, Seven bucks. It cost me round numbers on the back end.

I'm continuing to automatically invest into my future and it's just so great because a lot of people it's like pulling out tooth or like I don't know they say like pulling out hair right where you have to withdraw your money from your checking account, putting into an investment brokerage and it feels like you're losing the money because you see your checking account going down. But with this it makes it a lot easier. where it's more automated and it doesn't feel as if you're really losing money or in essence, you know the entirety of it. You're not losing money in the first place, but generally this is how most people feel.

Now personally for me, I would still recommend not use using the debit card I will just do the automatic Investments through your checking account and then for your daily purchases, use something like a credit card where you can get anywhere from 1.5 to even 40 percent back on your purchases from getting select welcome bonus offers. And yes, you heard that right, you can literally get up to 40 back by using certain credit cards getting those welcome bonus offers. and this is all taught on my channel as well. So if you guys are new to the whole credit card game guys, what we're really known for, check out some of those videos at the end of this video too.

Now Acorns also has one of my favorite tools, which is their investing calculator that can also take into contribution of how much money you'll invest over time and how long you're willing to leave your money there and what it would grow too. So say I Had an initial deposit of just a hundred dollars and I decided to put a contribution of a hundred dollars into my Acorns account every week and I wanted this to grow just for 20 years. Okay, I'm putting an average annual return of 10 I Think this is still pretty fair, but if you want to be extra conservative because I've seen my account grow more than six percent year over year, we'll see six percent. If we calculate the estimate of that, that'll still be two hundred one thousand dollars by the end of that amount.

But say, as an example, we switch it up. instead of a hundred dollars, we do a thousand dollars and instead of investing just a hundred dollars every week, we do a thousand dollars every single month and we want it to grow I can put it in there for 30 years I'll put 30 years. Let's do a 10 average annual return that would be 2.2 million dollars so you can see the power of compound interest take into effect. So with all that being said, is Acorns the best option? Well, in this video, I'm gonna be ranking each one of these apps in four categories so we're going to be going through ease of use which means can a beginner hop in, figure it out, or does it require some basic knowledge before getting started? We're going to be talking about flexibility.

So do you have the ability to choose a wide variety of different investment types? Number three: this is going to be fees. so are you gonna just burn through a ton of money just by using their platform? And number four is going to be Sign Up Bonuses. Does this app here offer a sign Up bonus to help you get farther faster with your goal? So with Acorns, as we mentioned earlier, this app is very easy to use and it's specifically built for a lot of beginners. You can even just open this app, have zero trading experience, and easily figure out how to use it and to make money today.

Now, because this is one of those apps where you set it, you forget it and then you check in on it every once in a while. In this category, I would give Acorns a 5 out of 5. Now, in terms of flexibility, this is where they're going to be getting a much lower two out of five. And this is because although they allow you to invest in a wider variety of assets, it seems like you just don't have that many options if you wanted to.

On top of that, this app is also designed around their managed portfolios, which is a good starting point, but it's not great for anyone with a bit more experience. On the other end of that, they did recently add the ability to add custom assets to your portfolio, so to do this, you're actually going to need their premium to your membership. and they also limit you to a percentage of your portfolio based on your risk profile setting. Now, even though this is not supposed to be a brokerage and this is an investment app that does it for you.

I Also like the fact that they add flexibility in you being able to open up an IRA account and invest through there Ira Accounts 401ks I mean even the Roths like all that stuff, is designed to help you even get more tax advantages and keep this money growing. With all that considered, it's going to be getting a two out of five on the point scale where Acorns does happen to make up. A couple of points is that you don't need any investment minimum amounts now instead of being forced to buy a full stock. you can invest literally as little as five dollars into their platform to start making money today.

and their fees are actually pretty good for everything this app has to offer. You only have to pay a three dollar a month fee and there are no investing fees, no commissions. It's just three dollars a month. Compare this to like any wealth managers or advisors where they literally take a percentage of your portfolio.

I Think this is a pretty good trade-off now. I Understand that if you're just getting started, you got a portfolio of a hundred dollars. That is going to be a high fee, but relative to most people's average accounts for their Investments I Still think this is pretty solid. Last but not least, for their sign up bonus I'm gonna have to give it a pretty low score of one out of five.

Now using the link down below, you can get five dollars when you sign up and create your account, but realistically, this is just gonna pay for almost not even entirely, but almost two months of your monthly fee. Back when I first started Acorns, their app to use was only one dollar a month. Not too bad at all, but they did since then raised it to three dollars. But if you are able to see this, you know in a long term format where basically Acorns is just three dollars a month for a whole year, you're only paying 36 dollars a year in order to get all of these benefits.

One last note, Acorns also has FDIC Insurance that's going to cover you up to 250 000 in cash and five hundred thousand dollars in Investments. Another good thing is though, every app on this list that I'm gonna mention has protection of this sort, so it's gonna give you some more peace of mind. And no, that if we do have any type of liquidity crisis like we saw this year, with some of the major Banks going on a run, you should be covered. Moving forward, the number two app on our list here is going to be Weeble.

Now Weeble is much more targeted to beginners and intermediate Traders so you'll have a lot more choices for Investments using this app. Unlike Acorns, this is more of a brokerage too, not an app that just invests it all for you. What I love about Weeble is that they're very easy to use, even for beginners. They have a mobile app as well as an app for your computer and even your iPad and it allows for more advanced tools so you can level up your trading compared to what some of these other brokerages usually offer.

and if they do offer it, they offer it to you at a cost. On top of that, Weibo also has a wide variety of Investments that you can choose from and this ranges from stocks, options ETFs and even other cryptocurrencies that you can buy, trade, or sell. They also offer educational resources, but in comparison to other apps, it's pretty light and it's not the most useful, but it is still better than none now. I've been using Weeble for over a few years now and it's been pretty great.

I Love the functionality, but I will say it did take me a while to get used to it, but now everything works very seamlessly. You know where the watch list is, you know how to access the market, the feeds tab, you can go into your own menu and then you can see your portfolio make trades and I've never had an issue. Now if you don't want to use the Weeble mobile app, you can actually download an app for your iOS MacBook or your PC and that works extremely well too. So when it comes to the ease of use of Weeble I personally give this a 4.5 out of 5..

there's a lot going on within their app, but I feel like it's still pretty well organized and clear to understand in terms of flexibility. I would give Weeble a 4.5 out of 5. this is because they still offer crypto and options trading which is a big step up to allow investors a wide array of different Investments to help grow your money. but they also offer traditional Roth and rollover IRAs through their platform so you can continue to save on taxes with your invest on top of that.

Weeble also offer something called a fractional shares of most assets, so in case you don't know, a fractional share is pretty much like. Instead of being able to buy just one whole stock of Apple where it's 200 and you might not have 200, you could still buy a fraction of Apple where you buy like 50 worth of it and you would then own 25 of that stock. Most brokerages would require you to pay the full 200 if you want to buy one share, so it does offer flexibility for anyone who's trying to get into the space. and if there's a stock that costs like two thousand dollars a share, you have the chance of being able to buy it through their app.

What I also love about Weeble is the fact that you can get five percent Apy via their cash management on uninvestment cash. So right now with inflation going up and a lot of people continuing to sit on their cash, this is a great way for you to not completely lose out on your money and still have it grow on the side passively. With Weeble, you're also going to get Sipc protection which covers you on up to 250 000 in cash assets, so you can feel confident that if anything happens to happen for any reason, for whatever at all, you're going to be covered. So for Weeble I'd give it a 4.5 out of 5 within their fees.

This is because you're still going to be paying fees, but yet they're still very minimal. What Weeble does is they offer commission free trading which is a huge plus, but you will pay some very small transaction fees on things like options trading. On top of that, you'll pay some minor SEC and Finra fees on standard trades, but they become very negligible and if you're already making money, trading or investing into the stock market most of the time, you're not even going to notice it just because it's so little to offset those fees. Though, if you do end up signing up for Weeble right now, they're offering you up to 12 free fractional shares using the link Down Below in the description and this could range anywhere from getting three dollars all the way up to three thousand dollars.

And it's also a great way to beef up your portfolio when getting started. In order to qualify for this sign up promotion, all you have to do is deposit at least a hundred dollars when you sign up and for that, I'm gonna give Weeble a 4.5 out of 5.. So with doing the math, this brings up Weeble to have a score of 18 out of 20. And the biggest problem with this app, like I said is going to be the educational material, the lack of it.

But as a total beginner I would see that this app is still very viable and even though it could be a little intimidating for our newbies. I'd recommend with all the tools that they have, even like paper trading where you can trade it using fake money first, this is still giving you all the tools that you need in order to succeed as an investor. Now for the third app here we're going to be taking a look at MooMoo now I Know the name here is a bit odd I Frankly was very skeptical in the beginning too when I First heard of a new brokerage called MooMoo but if you're able to look past that, it's actually a pretty solid app too now similar to Weeble MooMoo is actually very organized I Would actually consider this to be if not like, just as organized as Weeble if not even more. They have a lot of access to Advanced tools and features for higher trading levels.

A lot of similar things to Weeble but you know they organize it a little differently and one thing that I actually love about their app is that they give you a lot of notifications on news alerts or you know, press conference releases or like the Fomc meeting details and they're usually one of the first people to notify me. On top of that, just by going through the app, you can see a lot of overviews. You can see different markets you can go into your accounts, you can go into the news, you can discover more, you can learn more. You can also do paper trading I mean the list goes on and on with the accessibility that this app also has to offer.

Whether it's stocks, options ETFs or even margin trading, they open it up so you have a particular amount of tools that can get you pretty far. Now the main thing to know about MooMoo is that it's best meant for advanced Traders but they still do have a lot of features that are geared towards beginners as well. As we just mentioned, they offer paper trading which can let you experience a market without the risk of money loss. but on top of that, my favorite tool is their stock analysis one and Market insights where they allow you to understand exactly why a market is moving in what certain direction.

Their predictions have not been too far off and they also have a lot of accessibility with charting tools. but as a beginner I'm sure you're not going to be using too much of that stuff. so I'm not going to talk about it even more than that. but the tools do exist similar to Weeble, There is a bit of a learning curve, but if you watch like a 10 to even 20 minute video or even just one of their tutorials within their app on how to use it, you should be able to get it down.

In terms of ease of use, I'd give MooMoo a 4 out of 5. for flexibility, they have a few good points and also a few bad ones. Because they don't allow you to buy fractional shares, they don't have an IRA option and they also don't do crypto trading which I think would knock off a few points. On the other hand, though, they do allow you to access markets outside of just the US which is a pretty cool little neat way to invest Around the Clock in different places.

So with knowing all that I would give them a 3.5 out of 5 here. and when it comes to their fees much as the same as what Weeble does, they are completely commission free trading platform and they only charge a very small transaction fee on certain trades. With that being said, I give them a 2.5 out of 5 on their fees. but here's where they really make it up.

They have a very very solid welcome bonus offer for any new people trying to sign up for their app where you get up to 16 free stocks worth anywhere from 32 dollars to 32 000 bucks now. I Will mention that this offer here changes frequently so I'd recommend you guys check out the link Down Below in the description to see what the current offer is. I Remember a month or two back it was like 20 free stocks and then they reduced it and sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down. but either way this here is still free stocks.

You get full 16, they're not fractional 16 free stocks and all you have to do is deposit and hold five thousand dollars in your account for 60 days and you get even more stocks on top of that. Now if you don't want to put five thousand dollars into an exchange, you can put a thousand dollars into there and they'll still give you 10 stocks back. If you don't want to do a thousand dollars, you know you're holding your cash conservatively. You can at least deposit a hundred dollars and still get five free stocks and a 50 cash bonus for this year.

I'd give it a three out of five on the point scale which adds up together to be 15.5 out of 20, which puts them in the number two spot just behind. Weeble For our fourth app, let's take a look at a different exchange which is more in the crypto space and this is going to be Coinbase. This app here is still one of the best beginner friendly apps to get started primarily with crypto just because of how clean and simple the interface is. So Coinbase only offers crypto trading, but I thought it was a great addition here because of how few of these other apps give you that option.

What I love about Coinbase 2 is that they're actually publicly traded on the stock market, so you see a lot of their financials. There's transparency, and you don't have to worry about this exchange collapsing like we did with some of the other ones with Coinbase. Because they're focused primarily on crypto, you're also going to have a lot more variety and being able to invest into different cryptocurrencies. Last but not least, they also have their own native Nft Marketplace So if you're into Nfts and you're thinking that's a good opportunity to get into the space, this app is going to allow you to get into trading that as well.

Now for Coinbase to give you a ton of educational resources to help you learn along the way and give you even some free crypto rewards on top of that. I would give them a 5 out of 5 on the point scale Now Coinbase isn't the most flexible platform because it's crypto focused, but you are going to have a wide variety of different ways to make money. Whether it's staking, whether it's trading, whether it's sending your crypto to another like hot wallet and then using that to get into a D5 protocol and making even more money that way, Coinbase is pretty much the Gateway for you to have access to other tools on that front I'd give them a three out of five, but it's worth noting. Coinbase does have a weakness, and compared to a standard crypto exchange, their fees is not as crazy, but it's still pretty high.

From transaction fees to gas fees, to even the considerable Coinbase fee that you sometimes need to pay. Depending on if you're using their basic plan or their Advanced plan, there's going to be things that you want to look out for. I Remember, there was a point too that I was trading like ten thousand to twenty thousand dollars worth of crypto and some of my trades and I forgot to trade it through their Advanced method. So that actually made me pay like hundreds if not thousands of dollars in fees over to Coinbase.

So there are ways to circumvent this pretty much. If you pay thirty dollars a month coinbase for their Coinbase One subscription, you don't have to pay any transaction fees at all. If you've trade a lot, there's definitely gonna be a lot of value you get and you're going to get positive Roi But if you're not using the app often and you're paying that 30 a month, it's going to be the highest monthly fee that you pay just to use a crypto exchange. So on that front, I'm gonna give them a 1.5 out of 5..

When it comes to their welcome bonus offer, it's pretty solid. With the link down below, you can get up to 200 when you spin this little wheel that they got, and if we compare that to like MooMoo and Weeble yes, you can make more money with the MooMoo and Weeble sign up bonuses. but with Coinbase, you do have a chance of getting that 200 and if you complete all their little educational stuff, you're going to be able to make a bit more on top of that. So with Coinbase, I'm going to give them 4.5 out of 5 on that scale, which brings them to a total of 13 out of 20..

Real quick though. I Do want to mention security, especially since we're talking about crypto and over the last year we've seen a lot of those exchanges completely collapse and we've seen a lot of hacks and stuff happening. Well, if you didn't know, Coinbase also happens to be the largest crypto exchange here in the US now and it has a very strong balance sheet of over five billion dollars in cash on assets on hand. If you also use that Coinbase One membership, you're also going to have coverage on up to a million dollars in your Coinbase account.

Now personally, if you want to take your crypto safety to a whole nother level, I would highly recommend you to use a cold storage wallet. Something that I've been using this past year is Trezor. They haven't had any issues, no you know, controversy or leaks or anything regarding that. and I recommend anyone who invests into crypto at some point using this so you can pick up one of those devices linked Down Below in the description.

Last but not least, we gotta talk about Robinhood because this is one of those exchanges that I started out with where I was using it back in the day when I was still going to school and over the past few years. I Want to say it's now a little bit questionable with all the other apps that exist, all the welcome bonus offers that they provide, and then some of the more controversial things that happened during the AMC days with the massive Wall Street bets movement. I've now been moving away from Robin Hood If you don't remember what the volatility was, just imagine this: Imagine buying five thousand dollars worth of AMC right before it took off, where it was going from 10 to 15 to even 25 000 and at a point when you wanted to sell and cash out Robinhood restricted you and told you you have no option and you're not allowed to do anything with the own money that you own. Now that happened back in 2021, not once, but actually happened three times.

And basically it turns out whenever we needed the platform the most kind of like Avatar Aang we couldn't actually count on it, it was gone when Svb collapsed earlier this year. Robin Hood also didn't allow people to short positions to cash out on their trades right when they could take the most amount of profit. Not to mention because Robin Hood was also one of the first free investing platforms. They used something called payment for order flow instead of locking in the best price for yourself on buying a certain stock.

Robinhood would sell your data to a high frequency trading firm to earn a profit. This year made a lot of people question whether or not the customers best interest was still aligned and it's one of those reasons a lot of people actually left. Robin Hood and they are now using some of these alternative apps now if you can Overlook All those things I think Robin Hood Still does have one of the best UI and Ux experiences that we can use on a native app. They still make it very easy to use in transferring money, buying and trading stocks.

but for me personally I value all the times where Robin Hood was not reliable and in the off chance we get another Bull Run We got crazy moments happening I Don't want them to control how my orders are done. so with all that being said, looking at our list, we have Weeble followed by MooMoo. Then we have Acorns and then Coinbase which are also tied for that third place position and then for our last platform it would be Robin Hood. Now these four platforms are really solid and the great thing is because all of them are free.

When you initially sign up, you can take advantage of the welcome bonus offer. Check out the links Down Below in the description if you have one or maybe not the other or you may not have none of them at all. At least just get all the welcome bonus offers. Make sure you hit that minimum deposit if you don't like the app.

For whatever reason, you can transfer it back into your checking account, use one primarily or or you could just use all of them. That's kind of what I'm doing right now. All the links for that will be down below in the description. and before you get into investing, you should also educate yourself even more so you don't lose money in the markets and that you have all the tools in order to succeed.

I've made a ton of full-length guides here on YouTube in order to get started and these are free educational courses with PowerPoint presentations and slides all available on YouTube Some of them are like an hour long guys, so be sure to check out the link Down Below in the description I worked really hard to make those videos and I know that you guys will learn something new. And by the way, if you guys want to join our newsletter, I will have a link for that down below in the description. And if you want to join an investing Community we have a link to our Patreon that is going to be at the cost of a Netflix membership 14.99 Join our patreon, Say what's up to the group, take a look at some of the other benefits that we offer, and other than that that is everything. Have a blessed day and peace out.