Now days there are multiple ways one can begin investing in the stock market, with or without experience. Back in the old days, the stock market was a literal market where businessmen and women met and exchanged stock certificates that represented a share of a company.
Thankfully, you can start investing in the stock market today in as little as 5 minutes, and you don't even need to have prior experience in investing. Whether you're new to investing, or if you aren't sure where to start, or maybe you just don't understand the technology now days, here you will find out how to invest in the stock market online in a few easy steps.
Invest In The Stock Market Online
In order to invest in the stock market, you need to open a brokerage account with an investment bank. An investment bank differs from a regular bank account in that they are simply the middle man between you and the stock market.
You deposit your money into your brokerage account, and the investment bank handles the transactions of investing your money accordingly. The most user-friendly investment banks will offer a smart phone app that allows you to check your bank account balance easier.
Where to open your investment account
The first place to start investing your money online is determining where you want to open up your investment account. You may find that over time you have multiple investment accounts with different investment companies, because each company has a unique benefit that sets it apart from others.
Some companies cater to investing for beginners, others are specific to a certain type of investing such as impact investing. Other investment companies are specific to long term investing and diversifying, while others allow you to purchase individual stocks or even fractions of stock shares. See why you might have multiple investment accounts over time?
The following are different investment options for different investment objectives.
Invest your spare change
Acorns is a vastly growing investment app that allows you to invest your spare change. You can sync your bank account to your Acorns investment account, and Acorns will round up all your purchases to the next nearest whole dollar. It then takes the rounded up spare change and invests it into a diversified investment portfolio.
What if you don't have any prior experience? Not a problem. Through a series of questions, they will put together a professional investment portfolio that is invested into multiple different companies allowing you the access to professional advice, at a fraction of the cost….just $1 per month is all they charge!
Along with the benefit of investing your spare change, Acorns also allows you to redeem cashback offers when shopping through their affiliate links at major retailers. They have partnered with hundreds of the top retailers allowing you to make purchases at your favorite stores and a percentage of your purchase will be invested into your investment account for you.
Acorns allows you to open an Acorns Later account, which is an individual retirement account (IRA) to also begin investing money for your retirement (something we all should have started years ago).
Invest in meaningful projects
Companies like Swell Investing allows you to invest in our planet. What does that mean? When you open up an account with Swell Investing, they give you multiple options of investment portfolios that consist of companies that are contributing to common challenges our planet faces.
Among the portfolios they offer are:
⇒ Green Technology
⇒ Clean Water
⇒ Zero Waste
⇒ Renewable Energy
⇒ Healthy Living
⇒ Disease Eradication
Each of their portfolios are put together by professionals and allow you to diversify your investments among multiple companies to a global cause.
⇒ A Beginners Guide To Investing: Everything You Need To Know ⇐
Invest using a Robo Advisor
You're probably wondering what the heck a “Robo Adviser” is. A robo adviser is an investment company that uses technology to provide investment solutions and portfolios based on your investment objectives. They use algorithms to determine your investment portfolios based on a few investment questions asked upon opening your account.
Robo advisors such as Betterment are slowly gaining the popularity of investors due to the low cost, high expertise access to investing in a well diversified portfolio. Betterment allows you to invest your money automatically and spreads your money among many companies in a portfolio based off your answers to investment questions and goals for your money.
They also give you a unique feature to ask an investment professional common questions for free and as often as you need, through their investment chat feature through their app. Simply post your question and an investment professional will respond to you directly within usually 24 hours time or less.
Invest in individual stocks or fractional shares
In the past, and still currently with many investment banks, you only had the option to invest in whole shares. In other words, you couldn't invest in 1.5 shares of a stock, it has to be 1 share or two shares. Not anymore!
Companies like Stockpile allow you to invest in fractional shares and whole shares of stock. Why is this an awesome feature? Because if you want to take advantage of investing in large companies like Amazon or Apple, but don't have hundreds or thousands of dollars to purchase just one share of their stock, you can't participate.
Wit Stockpile, you can invest as little as a few bucks into any publicly traded stock company. This allows for the average income household to get great investment returns that formerly only those with a lot of discretionary money were able to participate in.
How To Get Started Investing
With each of the investment banks listed above, the process to start investing is nearly the same. All you need to do choose your starting point, and follow the steps that each company will walk you through to open up your account.
Next you need to link your bank account, which they will also walk you through how to do. Once you've got your bank account linked, all you need to do is make your first deposit and begin investing.
The most important thing is to start investing as early as you can. This allows you to take advantage of compound interest, and years down the line you will have a nice nest egg you never thought would grow so fast.
With the help of any of the investment companies listed here, you can put your investing on autopilot by setting up automatic transfers every week, bi-weekly or monthly. This ensures the habit of saving money and investing regularly a non-negotiable.
Thanks for opening up my eyes to these real possibilities to invest in the stock market. The beauty of these ones is that virtually anybody can start investing. How reliable are the opportunities mentioned by you and which ones would yield highest returns? Does anyone of them guarantee a certain level of pay-outs? Sorry, for asking all these questions, but I have always been a bit of a sceptic on stock market investment.
I like it though that you make everybody aware, that if possible, they should start investing as soon as possible, however small the amounts initially, because as you say even little money can become big over time.
As far as reliability they are all excellent choices, I use them all personally and each are very user friendly, easy to set up, and have a track record of being trustworthy and reputable companies.
As for the returns, obviously there are never any guarantees of returns in the stock market, but as of right now Swell Investing seems to have a niche area of opportunity that have been yielding great results.
Having said that, the returns are all dependent upon your investments of choice and may vary some (again, no guarantees and this could change with time).
The biggest game changer for investing is time, and with these investing platforms, you don’t need a ton of money to start investing even just $5!
Hope that answers your questions, thanks Jerry!
I have used robo advisors in the past, but I feel like these have only been around for such a short amount of time that I don’t know how they will react to a big market correction. These days everyone is an expert since so many of the advisors started after the financial crisis. I have been searching for an advisor lately and mostly I want someone who can help protect me on the downside. I think we all know it’s coming, just a matter of when. Are there ways to invest online that will also give me some personal guidance if you need it? I am kind of looking for a hybrid option, inexpensive ways to place trades, but help when I need it. Thanks, I look forward to hearing back from you.
Hi Steve. Great questions. So a robo advisor won’t react to the market for you based off of market conditions. All a robo advisor does is simply asks you a series of questions, and puts together a diversified portfolio for you based off your responses to those questions.
Generally they have 3-5 portfolio options ranging from very aggressive, aggressive, moderate, and conservative portfolios for example. The robo advisors will suggest your portfolio based off your risk tolerance, and then will automatically re-balance your portfolios regularly. It can’t buy and sell or make trades for you without your permission legally (with the exception of rebalancing, which will be detailed in the account agreements).
So if the market were to have a downturn, it would be up to you to either withdraw your funds or let them ride out the wave. The robo advisor will not change your investments according to a market dip. Keep in mind that 100% of market downturns have come back. Thus a popular strategy is to buy and hold for the long term.
The only sane advice for anyone afraid of the market dropping is to have a diversified portfolio of investments (stocks, bonds, real estate, cash, money market, life insurance, etc.). A robo advisor is just be one portion of your investments and certainly shouldnt be where you put all of your money. Its more of an option for people that want to invest in the stock market with expert help, but dont want to pay the high fees of hiring a financial advisor. Thats where a robo advisor comes in.
As far as having personal guidence, almost all robo advisors give you free access to their investment experts via email or chat. If you have an investment question, you can send in your question via email or chat and one of their licensed investment professionals will respond usually within 24 hours. Along with that they all provide free content to their members on stock market guidance and FAQs.
If you’re wanting to invest in individual stocks for low costs, then companies like Stockpile are a great option. You can invest in any stock of your choice with as little as $5, and the trade fees are usually about $0.99 per trade (as opposed to the high fees around $4.99+ that regular brokerage firms charge).
Hope that helps! Best of luck!