Welcome back to the channel I'm Suzanne with Arvabelle and in this video I'm
going to show you how you can start investing with M1 Finance. If you find
this video helpful and you're not already subscribed to the channel
consider subscribing remember to drop a like and we'll get started
M1 Finance is a great platform for beginners. They don't have commission
fees, you can buy fractional shares, and overall it's just it's very nicely laid
out and I love it. This is going to be a walk through of it and if you do decide
that you want to sign up with M1 finance I have an affiliate link in the
description that you can use if you would like to. Alright so I'm sort of
fudging this first part because I already have an account set up so this
is going to be sort of a combination of screenshots and screen recordings. So
when you first try to open an account it's going to ask you for your email and
for you to make a password. I figured that I don't really need to show you
that because I think everyone knows how to do that. So the next page that you're
going to see is the three steps so that's create a pie, open your account, and fund
your account. A big feature of M1 Finance is that you can visually see what your
portfolio is made up of, so they divide your stocks into this nice visual pie
for you to look at and you can make adjustments to what percentage of your
portfolio those stocks are. Okay so let's create one of these pies and you can
always go back and change this later so I'm gonna put Amazon Disney and NVIDIA
in this one just because I know that the percentages on the next screen are going
to be really dramatic. So you can find these stocks that you want with the
the full word Disney and it'll show you. And then we're gonna close out of that
and just hit continue. Once you sign up with your account you can go back and
rebuild your pies or build a completely different pie this is just to sort of
show you how it works. So this next screen is where we can change the
percentages or we can change how much of our portfolio is made up of certain
stocks so we're going to change Amazon to 50 we're going to change Disney and
NVIDIA to 25 each. That's good. Continue and we've created our first pie. So I
told you that this is going to be a dramatic one just because of how much
Disney and NVIDIA and Amazon have grown over the last five years. So this will
look different depending on which stocks you choose and something to keep in mind
this looks very very good but the chances of you having invested in only
these three companies five years ago is you know pretty slim and something else
to consider when looking at this especially if this is your first time
investing yes this looks great this looks awesome but this is not how the
stock market usually works. We have been in a bull market (where the stock market
is going up) for the last decade or so, so it will not always look like this. You
can see we have this dip in December that can easily happen again and we can
easily go back into a bear market (where the stock market is going down) so just
be aware that if you're just starting to invest that this it does not always have
to perform like this. Alright so we're going to press continue and then blah
blah blah continue okay so this is where you enter all of like the information
that's required for any brokerage and any bank account it's same information
that's required obviously I'm not going to show you this part but you go through
this as usual. This next screen is going to be where you can connect your bank
account so if you do online banking which most people do you can go ahead
and connect your account if you want to. For a regular account with M1 Finance
just an individual portfolio you only need $100 to get
started but if you open up any sort of retirement account I believe you do need
$500. If you want to add a different type of account like if you
want to make this a Roth IRA or a regular IRA or rollover an account that
you already, have we're going to go to this add account in the corner and you'll
be able to select what type of account you want. So we're
going to choose retirement and we are going to make this one a Roth IRA
Continue. And then you would enter your social security number which I am also
not going to show you. After you choose your account type you're going to see
this screen where it's like does everything look okay? and just make sure
that you chose the correct account type and if you would like to, you can read
through all of the terms and agreements. So once all of that is done and you're
actually in here you're like oh where the heck did my pie go that I made when I
was signing up? So you're going to find that under the research tab and this is
going to be where you build new pies and where you can look at different stocks
and funds that are available on the platform. This first tab is news and then
you see we have stocks, funds, and then my pies is where the pie that you just made
is going to be at. So I'm going to click on that. I already - I made a few pies - oops.
But the one that you made when you sign up will be called my first PI so you can
click on that and there it is our Amazon Nvidia and Disney pie. What's great about
these pie overviews is that you can immediately see how this allocation of
stocks performed over the last five years, and you can immediately see what
your dividend yield would be for this particular pie. Now let's talk about this
chart for a second. So this is a little bit sneaky because the furthest out it
goes is five years. So this is not including the recession it isn't showing
you that so in my opinion it is best when you are doing your research to go
and look somewhere else for the charts that way if you're investing long term you
can get a more accurate idea of how it has moved in the past, how that stock has
performed during a recession, and so on. So if we want to make changes to this pie,
if you want to change the percentages or you want to add something else you can
go into edit and over here we can change the percentages just like we did when we
were setting it up. But if you want to add another stock to it we'll click this
add button and let's add Tesla to this. Okay
so you'll click on the stock. You can see all of the charts you can look at
whatever you want and then when you're ready to add it to your pie you click
this add to basket and you could do this with multiple stocks, you would add them
all to your basket, and then here at the bottom we'll click Add. And you can see
that it's added it, but it didn't set a percentage so we have to go in and
change that. So after we're done changing it we'll hit save and there we go it
updated with Amazon Disney Nvidia and Tesla. If you were actually ready to
invest in this pie, you would click this add to portfolio and then you would be
able to fund this pie with whatever you have in your account and remember
M1 Finance does fractional shares, so it doesn't matter how much money you put
into your account. Whatever amount that is it will be divided between the stocks
that you have in your pie. This really makes it such a great platform for
beginners because just with this example pie to buy one share of each of these
stocks you would need about twenty five hundred dollars but since you can start
your M1 account with $100 or $500 for a retirement account this really allows
you to start diversifying early on which is a super nice feature to have. So
getting a little bit more advanced, you can also build pies made up of other
pies. I'll show you an example of this so I'm going to delete this one and we're
going to rebuild it. First and you would need to create whatever pies you
actually want and I've already done that so I'm going to click create a new pie
and we're going to combine all of those together. So we're going to go up here
instead of stocks funds we're going to go to my pies and this will show all of
the ones that you've already made so for this pie I'm going to choose everything
except for that first example pie because I don't want that one. So then
we're going to click add just like we did with the stocks and it will create
this new pie so I'm going to call this main pie. Okay and then we can adjust the
percentages just like the other thing so I'm going to go ahead and do that we're
gonna hit save okay so now we have this main pie setup and then you can see that
each of these is its own pie. So we'll click on one of these. We'll
click on the real-estate one. So you can see the inside here I have a Vanguard
real estate fund as well as Realty Income Corporation. Creating multiple
pies is really useful if you want to be able to more easily go in and edit a
certain sector or see how a certain sector is performing. But let's say you
really just have no interest in picking stocks and you'd really rather have
someone divide up your portfolio for you. In that case you can go over to this
expert pies and M1 Finance has these different portfolios that they have
already put together for you. So a great one if you are opening a retirement
account is to click on this plan for retirement section and under here you'll
see different options depending on the year that you retire. So the furthest out
it goes currently is 2060 and each one of these it gives you several options so
it gives you aggressive conservative and moderate depending on how risk tolerance
you are and if we click on one of these we can see what is inside of this
portfolio so most of these are going to be made up of different Vanguard funds
and Vanguard ETFs and the good thing about these is that they have a
relatively low expense ratio and these, I mean, this is not investing advice, but
these are pretty good allocations like these are very similar to other
portfolios that those Robo advising companies put together. These are very
very similar to that. So this could be a great option going to that expert pies
tab if you aren't really interested in picking your own stocks. And it's not
just for retirement either you can see under here we have general investing and
just stocks and bonds so let's look at one of these. So even within this it
gives you different options depending on your risk tolerance so
again let's just click on like moderate so these are mostly made up of Vanguard
funds as well and a couple of other bonds. So you can see that you really
have a lot of options when you're investing with M1 Finance but I did want
to bring up a couple of things that people may have questions about or that
could be viewed as sort of cons depending on what you're investing goals
are. M1 finance is not meant for day trading or for swing trading so normally
with other brokerages you would be able to buy or sell that instant with M1
Finance it's a little bit different they only have one trading window that
happens once per day so that's essentially one time a day where they
are putting in all of their orders. So what that means is that if you are
trying to day trade or swing trade and buy and sell stocks at particular prices
at particular times M1 Finance is not for you, that is not what this platform
is for. This is meant more for long term investing. Another thing is that although
there aren't fees for buying or selling stocks, there aren't any commissions
there are still some other fees like if your account is inactive for a certain
amount of time or if you're transferring an account but those fees are pretty
typical across all brokerages. I just think that having the no commission
trades and the fractional shares and being able to start with very little
money it's this it just makes it such a great platform for beginners. If you do
decide that you want to use M1 Finance I do have an affiliate link in the
description that you can sign up with if you want. You don't have to but if you
want to it is there. If there's anything else that you have questions on or
anything that I left out be sure to leave it down in the comments. Remember
to subscribe to our channel drop a like on this video and I will see you