🕓📦 New Solutions

Acorn, which rounds up your daily banking and credit card spending, deposits the change into one of five portfolios of your choice. However, the monthly fee may be higher in ratio compare to how many transactions you make in a month. What the company does show on their pricing page is that the service is “Free for college students with a valid .edu address for up to four years from date of registration” (Acorns App, 2017) which should make the service attractive to students. There are some interesting ways explained on acorns.com about how there are other ways to create automated investing through their smartphone app.

Stash has created custom preset ETFs of their own, which have millennial-driven theme names like The Trendsetter, The Techie, or even The Activist, creating a basket of bonds and ETFs to diversify the investment automatically. Stash has also made an easy to follow website found at stashinvest.com, which shows how an individual can invest through the Stash mobile app. The interesting part is the seeing that Millennials can start with five dollars and enable an optional weekly “Auto-Stash” to put money away. From a preliminary glance, it looks to offer the best of choice and diversification without requiring a lot of research time from the user.

Motif is a unique way to build portfolios of up to 30 stocks, choose the weighting of each, and then decide how much you want to invest with a single commission fee. To buy 30 stocks in any other broker would be 30 times five to nine dollar fees, plus a whole lot of cash to get the shares. Motif allows fractions of shares to be added to a portfolio if the weight is chosen causes a dollar value to be less than the price of a single share. Motif is also a community driven where themes or trends are organized, and people can choose to buy the “motif” or edit the list before buying. The company has quotes on their website at motifinvesting.com from various publications that indicated that Motif Investing is a disruptor to ETFs, which is like saying how share-riding businesses are a disrupter to taxicab companies.

Robinhood has been the new kid on the block recently and has applied pressure to the existing online brokers by offering traditional trading and investing of stocks and ETFs at no commission fees. Started by the same computer trading system installers that build the systems for the brick and mortar brokerage offices, they sought venture capital to start their App-only driven trading platform and set up a brokerage house. Their expenses are clamped to employee only offices and no bank locations, allowing them to offer other optional services to generate profits and keep the trading fees at zero dollars for the user. Their website has more information at robinhood.com where they explain how they make money and still offer commission free trades. For the person who wants to pick out stocks or ETFs to buy and sell, then Robinhood offers the cheapest in and out trading as well as just plain buy and hold. The Robinhood app also provides stop loss orders, which are conditional orders that sell securities that have dropped below a set price to prevent further losses on the stock or ETF.

From automated investment management to fully digital advice platforms, the future of financial is driven by technology. This wave of combing financial data and software that applies algorithm based rules to create planning for an individual all falls under the latest buzz word, "Fintech", which stands for Financial Technology. While the human touch is being replace with high tech, the advantage is a easier way to invest without an appointment or a distrust for banking personal pushing products that may not be in the best interest of the individual who walked in the door without any research. Number of firms looking to provide automated investment management through Robo Advisors will continue to expand as the ease of access is hard to debate.

For those who are not facing trust issues and would rather go with a more established broker that is not a traditional bank, the original brick and mortar brokerage locations offer online trading as well. Just recently, all brokers have cut their commission fees in half, thanks to the latest wave of online only competitors such as investing disruptor, Robinhood. Long time brokers such as Charles Schwab, E*Trade, Fidelity Investments, Scottrade, TD Ameritrade offer advisors and investing tools in going along with their trading platforms.