Today I attended a free webinar from M1 Finance, a great investment app that lets you do some pretty cool things.

About M1 Finance

This app is mostly for investing in stocks, and I believe it’s for beginners as well as more seasoned individuals. The app is available on both iPhone/iOs and Android devices. Setting up an account is easy. The initial investment is $100, which I didn’t know when signing up, but it wasn’t a big deal. Hooking up your bank is easy and future transfers are a breeze.

The system only makes trades once a day. They promote ‘time in market’ over ‘timing the market’, meaning they look at investing as a long term strategy, and not a day to day check-your-numbers game. I’m of that mindset as well.

Sign up to M1 Finance here (aff)

Webinar Cons

They started 7 minutes late.

The sound was bad, the speaker was very quiet (had to turn my sound to MAX).

The platform was constantly buffering. I’m on a hard ethernet line and not wireless. No other problems with my connection. To be sure, I also connected to the webinar via my cell phone, not on wifi, and I had the same problems, so I’m pretty sure this was at their end.

Chat was disabled so I couldn’t even alert them to the poor sound or connection quality.  If they were recording it, I hope it was local, because the online version sucked.

Webinar Pros

The webinar (what I could understand of it) was pretty simplistic, explaining how to get started with the app. I’m a big fan of the app because of the ability to buy microshares, something that RobinHood (aff) does not let you do.

Also as a beginner, I’m a fan of the auto-investing feature, which lets me build certain risk percentages and then they invest the money I put in automatically. Yeah, I’m at the mercy of the system, but at this stage of my investing career I’m ok with that. It beats the nothing I’ve done for the last 30+ working years.

M1 does let you also automatically reinvest any extra cash that you have in your account. This typically happens when you own stocks that pay out dividends. You can opt to keep that money in an account (not invest it), automatically reinvest it (seems like this is the most sensible option), or reinvest after a certain threshhold.

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of pros to go through because the quality was so poor that it timed out, and I didn’t want to keep chasing it down to listen. Hopefully they can redo it, or better yet pre-record it and let their users download it at their convenience.

Summary

While I’m new to investing, I often wonder why some of the financial gurus promote the fact that M1 is a more sophisticated investing tool to use. I’m a noob and found it easy to understand. Put money in, build your pie, and it does its thing. Maybe I’m too simplistic but I think for most new investors that just want to get something going, M1 is a great tool and easy to comprehend.

I have opted to fund my M1 Finance account over the next year because of the ability to do microshares, and I’ve stopped funding my RobinHood account for the opposite reason.

To get a free $10 to invest when you start a new M1 Finance account, click here.

To get a free stock via RobinHood, click here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.