Only 18.7% of Americans own stock. 88% of Americans making over one million dollars per year are invested in the stock market; this doesn’t include investments that happen off-market. If money is important to you, you need to be an investor. There is no other way. In a capitalist society, you win the game by accumulating more capital.
You will never be wealthy trading your time for money, because your time is limited. At the most, people can work around 12 hours per day, while money invested in the market works nonstop. You cannot outwork the capital that you control. Capital is leverage and the more leverage you have, the larger the weight you can lift.
Letting money work for you is what separates the rich from the poor. The poor trade their time for money. The rich invest their money The rich understand how powerful compound interest. Not everyone can have capital, and it isn’t fair; but the only way to change that is by a good-hearted moralist who has capital providing that to others. Understand the game you are in that you cannot walk away from.
Becoming a knowledgable investor is hard, but you don’t have to become one if you do not want to. At the minimum, you need to know enough to understand if the professional you hire to outsource this responsibility to is robbing you or not. You need to know how to spot a good deal, versus a scam, like a crypto rug pull.
Like everything, the more knowledge you have, the better. The more you know about investing, the greater likelihood that you, yourself will be wealthy.
You can start investing and learning how to invest on your phone. One basic form of investing is, dollar cost averaging, involves buying a set dollar amount of a stock or etf, regardless of the market conditions, understanding that over time the market continues to go up.
Remember, 88% of millionaires own stock.
Understand that you don’t have to seek money for money’s sake, you can gather wealth to make the world a better place.
Below are five apps for basic investing and education.
5 Apps For Learning How to Invest in The Stock Market
Robinhood
You can get a free stock to start off your investing journey using this link
Robinhood is a digital brokerage that promised to democratize investing by removing trading fees. Before Robinhood, placing a trade cost money. Now it’s free, which does have downsides, like encouraging overtrading instead of letting your assets compound over time. It can be used to dollar-cost average over time, and is a good entry-level platform for beginning investors who want to do some of their own research and investing.
Remember, do not invest money you cannot afford to lose. That means don’t invest the money you need for next months’ rent, because all investments carry some kind of risk with them.
Trading with ETF’s, which are electronically traded funds, can be a good entry point. ETF’s tend to be more stable than stock so less risky, but with less risk also comes less reward. So each investor needs to determine their risk tolerance. If you buy a share of SPY, you’re buying a sliver of the 500 companies contained in the S&P500 stock index. If you buy a share of XLK, which is the technology sector, you’re buying a sliver of technology companies.
Mint
Mint is not an investment tool, it’s used for money management. However, you can see your investments inside of Mint. Mint is an all-in-one wealth management and budget tracking app that acts as a virtual personal accountant you can access on any device.
Mint takes your accounts like your brokerage, checking, and savings, and gives you a breakdown of how much you spend and how you can manage your money better. The service will also collect all of your bills and help you stay on track of them. As an investor, you need to understand how much cash you have, which investments are profitable, which are not, and so on.
With Mint, you can see your cashflow, set budgets, and even see your credit score. It’s a useful tool to learn about your personal finances and make better decisions over how you manage your funds.
TD Ameritrade
TD Ameritrade is a instiutional brokerage that merged with Schwab. They also offer zero-commission trades, just like Robinhood. The benefit of TD Ameritrade is their trading application, called Think or Swim. You can use ToS to place trades in real-life. However, you can also use the Paper Money mode, which allows you to play on the stock market with fake money.
Using ToS in Paper Money mode will allow you to trade real companies and their stock, and their exact prices. Just understand that paper money removes the emotional pain of losing real money, so you need to keep that in mind.
Acorns
You can get $5 to start investing in Acorns for free using our link
Acorns is a micro-investing tool that automatically invests your spare change from purchases into a range of different funds.
Let’s say you buy a drink for $5.50. Acorns will “round-up” the .50 remainder, making the total of the purchase $6.00. The extra .50 gets automatically deposited into a fund.
Acorns allows you to save and invest money without having to think about it. You can also contribute a weekly or monthly amount; another way to invest without thinking.
Acorns is a good app to use to learn how to invest by seeing what happens to your money when you invest, without the overwhelming nature of picking what to invest in. Acorns let’s you pick your investments, but the picks are based of off your interests, as opposed to picking a specific security.
Learn: How to Invest in Stocks
Learn: How to invest in stocks is an app available on Google Play and the App store. The app’s entire purpose is to teach you how to invest and trade stocks. The lessons aren’t long, and there aren’t’ many, but you will get a novice foundational understanding of investing from this. Understand that the investment landscape is constantly changing, as it is a reflection of society at large.
Use Learn: How to invest in stocks when you aren’t able to access your computer, where you can take more intuitive classes, or invest from your computer with full access to research tools.