Where do I start with Investing? Who should I trust with my money? Where shall I put it to get a return on my investment? All great questions. With enough knowledge and the right platforms, you can feel secure in your decisions. The important thing is to actually invest or you’ll lose purchasing power to inflation every year. As long as you’re saving consistently and buying income producing or appreciating assets, you will be in good shape. The most reputable apps and sites that you can invest in and with confidence are as follows.
Disclosure: This page may contain affiliate links where theFIway.com receives compensation of some sort if you decide to utilize any resource. Benefits received do not influence our decision to post the link as these investing apps, sites, and platforms are recommended to increase your net worth. The links solely provide us a means to keep generating free content.
Powerful Investing Apps and Platforms
John Bogle revolutionized investing for the average person when he founded Vanguard and setup the world’s first index fund. The company is structured to operate at cost and is actually owned by investors like you. This allows the organization to avoid conflicts of interest and lower expenses for its funds. If you’ve read any of our recommended finance books, you’ll understand why the investing strategy that Vanguard was founded on is so valuable. Keep your fees low and buy the entire market with VTSAX.
The financial services offered by Fidelity are vast and the tools they provide for users are truely remarkable. Their investment arm has followed in Vanguard’s footsteps by offering low cost and even zero fee index funds. If you have a company sponsored retirement plan, you may already be quite familiar with Fidelity and what they have to offer. As the popularity of index investing rises, you may want to allocate a portion of your portfolio for actively managed funds. Fidelity’s Peter Lynch and William Danoff have proven that it’s not always a bad investment.
Investing in direct rental properties could be extremely lucrative or go horrible wrong. To diversify your real estate allocation and reduce risk, you have two options: Invest in REIT funds or use crowd funding and back peer to peer real estate loans. The award winning PeerStreet marketplace allows investors to profit from the interest on high yield short term real estate debt. You’ll be able to review the properties, see loan details / rates, and decide if you want to invest. Similar to buying a stock, do your due diligence before committing funds.
Cryptocurrency is the “Hail Mary” of speculative investing. If you decide to place a wager on blockchain technology, stay away from the massive amount of scammers and pyramid schemes out there. Either understand how it works and do it yourself with a physical wallet or use a trusted digital version with a secure exchange. CoinBase is the current leader in trading bitcoin and other digital currencies. The company provides everything you need to gamble in this risky phase of Cryptocurrency’s lifecycle. In January of 2017, one Bitcoin traded at $750…by year end $18,000…a year later $3,000. This is the most volatile market you can get into.
Sites to Increase Your Return on Investment
If you’re not satisfied with “set it and forget it” index investing, make sure you’re armed with enough knowledge about stock market investing to minimize risk due to negligence. Investopedia is a great free resource in and of itself, but a group of seasoned investors have recently spun up the Investopedia Academy for visual learners who prefer instructor led courses. It’s an “a la carte model” with no subscription fees. Pick the investing strategy that interests you and get lifetime access to video lessons, interactive materials, and downloadables from licensed professionals.
Finviz is your one stop shop for stock analysis. The Free sections of the site are relatively powerful and the UI is user friendly. Finviz makes excellent use of filters to segment the market and run comparisons. The information on each ticker contains just about every data point you can imagine as well as the latest news on a relevant company. If you’re a value investor or “Maverick” day trader, give yourself a better shot at success by thoroughly evaluating companies. Hope you love researching equities and the numbers behind them…otherwise, stick with index mutual funds.
