What is Acorns and how do I use it?

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Eta: looks like it takes about $100 a month

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So, if you invest less than $100, you lose money?

Meant my deposits into my acorns account were $100 per month

How do you want to invest it?


I just joined robinhood, but it's not the same concept, just no commission trading

I don't understand stocks, mutual funds, etc. I saw this as a learning opportunity and possibly a way to make money. I have bough silver and gold before, but I want something to manage daily/weekly.

I thought acorns invested your money for you. You can even choose how aggressive to make your investments. I will look at Robin hood though. Seem enough threads here for a year.

Robin hood for Android yet?

Here's my basic rundown of the free options for beginner investors:

Acorns
As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, Acorns is sort of a forced piggy bank. Your transactions are rounded up to the nearest dollar, and the difference is invested into your Acorn account. Investment options are very limited (not bad, just limited; so if you are doing this to learn about investment I'm not sure its a great option, whereas if you are trying to save some cash it works fine). I haven't personally used Acorn.

Robinhood App
Robinhood offers commission free trading of individual securities. It's a very basic platform and you are essentially limited to buying and selling shares. As far as I can tell there aren't many limits to the securities available for trade. The interface is easy to use, but it is not very easy to track your purchases and sales (you can see how many shares you own and total cost, but it's not broken down by purchase date), so if you plan on doing a lot of buying and selling you should probably track it in a separate spreadsheet as well. I've used Robinhood basically as a way to gamble on oil prices, some short term and some long term.

Loyal3

Also commission-free trading, but with more limitations. Purchases are done in batch, not real time, so you are subject to fluctuations in the market on purchase date, and there are a limited number of companies available. On the other hand, you can invest in $ amounts rather than shares, so its the easiest way to buy shares of more expensive companies, and its easy to set up recurring monthly purchases. This is more for buying and holding long-term. I invest about $300 per month using Loyal3 into what I call my "Robot Fund", divided between AAPL, AMZN, DIS, FB, GOOGL, INTC and MSFT. Basically I think there is a decent chance one of these companies will end up owning some technology that eventually becomes the most valuable thing ever, and I like being able to pick my own allocations.

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From what I can gather, it looks at your daily purchases from debit and credit cards and rounds it up to the next dollar

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So I looked at this more because it seemed odd to me if they were actually using the credit cards for the investment money because the cc company would charge a fee. Basically it looks at your credit card purchases determines what it would cost to round up to the next dollar, then transfers that amount from your checking account into the (mostly Vanguard) ETF's you select within the app.

The Acorn fees are $1/month for under $5k and .25%/yr for accounts over $5k. On top of that the ETF's have fees between 0.05% and 0.2%.

Search for my thread about acorns. They've reduced fees twice. I'll try to link when I get a chance.

Edit: NOFOX explained the updated fees.