Today we're going to look at the Public investing app. A few of you have wanted me to review some
new or different apps that I didn't include in the "Which brokerage you should use" video which needs
to be updated again but today we're going to take a look at Public because what they're doing is
pretty cool. If you guys want to sign up for Public and help support the channel, you can use
the link in the description and when you sign up you'll get up to $10 of a free stock. Public is an
investing app that's great for buying fractional shares and is great for long term investing.
There's also a social aspect to the app which makes it pretty cool and we will look at that
a little later in the video. There's no minimum amount of money that you have to have to sign
up or to start out with the app, and it is zero commission which means that you won't be paying
any commission fees on standard trades. Like I said earlier, it is an app that offers fractional
shares which basically means that if you don't have enough money to buy one whole share or if
you just don't want to buy one whole share you can instead put like $5 or $10 into a company or
whatever amount that you want. So if you wanted to buy Tesla stock for example, you could buy
one whole share if you wanted to, but if you just wanted to put in $10 and have that go toward Tesla
stock you could do that as well. This makes it really great for new investors or if you're just
dipping your toes into investing or just testing out the app, those fractional shares come in
super useful. Public has said that the majority of the users on their platform are long term
investors and sometimes you'll see that long term investors may go for some dividend paying stocks.
Now with stocks that pay dividends, some platforms offer the option to turn on dividend reinvestments
which is basically where the money that you earn from those dividends can automatically be put back
into those stocks. And public does offer that. In addition to that pretty standard dividend
reinvestment option, the platform does have a few other cool features that are pretty unique
to this platform. One of those is this safety feature that they have and these little safety
warnings that they show you. So sometimes you may be looking at stocks but not be totally sure what
the risks are associated with it. So they have different warnings like ones for micro-cap stocks,
or ones for volatile stocks, or for companies that are going bankrupt. So you'll see a label under
the stock and then if you actually try to buy that stock it will give you another warning popup
that will confirm that that's actually what you want to do. This is a great feature because it's
that little reminder to do your research on the things you're actually investing in. And seeing
that label when you first pull up the stock may help you avoid things that you may not want to
invest in. Public does also have a referral or a refer a friend program where if you give someone
your link to sign up, when they sign up they will get some free stock and you will get some
as well. What sets Public apart from apps like Robinhood and Webull is that they have actually
opted out of participating in payment for order flow or PFOF. What's also cool about Public is
that there is this whole social side to the app. So when you open up the app, on your front page
you'll see this social feed where you can see some other peoples posts, maybe some polls that people
have put out, and you can kind of keep up to date on what other people are doing. There's also the
option to have DMs or group chats which could be fun if you're already part of a Discord community
or something like that and you have a smaller group of people that you want to communicate
with - you can actually do that directly on Public's app. You can also follow people,
people can follow you, and you have the option to share your trades if you want to. So if you invest
in Tesla or Apple or whatever company, if you want other people to see that you can turn that on,
but if that's something that you don't want to share, you always have the option to turn that
back off. Again that's super fun if you have a group of friends that are into investing or if you
have a little Discord group that you're already a part of, or if you're joining in on any different
investment challenges or things like that. Public also has themes that you can look through which
are basically these watchlists that they put together of different companies in different
sectors or in different categories. You can create your own watchlist and when you go to a particular
stock you can actually see if that stock is on any of your friends' watchlists or the people that you
follow. So let's go ahead and open up the app and I'll quickly show you how you can actually buy a
stock. So once you've signed up with the link in the description and you claim your $10 stock
you'll actually get to pick which company you want that to go toward. So when I signed up I picked
Tesla as the company that I wanted so you can see that right there in my long term investment
portfolio. Now if you want to fund your account you will have that option when you are signing up,
but if you didn't do it then, you can go into that little person account icon. This is where you will
see your portfolio and then you can click on this deposit button. From here you can link your bank
account and you'll be able to add money into your Public account. That's pretty standard.
You can see that I've already put in $10 in here, so what we can actually do is go find a stock now.
So we'll click on this little magnifying glass and we can search for something that we want.
So if we type in Apple we can click on that stock and we can see if anyone that we are following
has that in their watchlist. We can see that a few people that I'm following do have Apple in
their watchlists, so if I do actually decide that I actually want to invest in this - I will click
that "Invest" button, and then this is where those fractional shares come in. I can choose to put $5
in Apple and if I actually wanted to invest that, I would click Invest and that $5 would go towards
Apple. Now I do want to show you a stock that does have some of those safety features and what
happens if you actually do have enough to buy a full share of a stock. So we'll close out of that,
go back, and this time I have it in my recent searches (when I was preparing for this video).
So we can see with this particular company that I pulled up that it is a low market
cap stock. And you can see that with that little warning sign that's right below the stock price.
So what happens when you actually try to invest in this? Well if we click the invest button, it's
going to make us confirm that we actually want to do this. Because it does have that safety feature,
because it does have that little warning for this particular stock, it is going to give you this
additional popup that I was talking about earlier. So if we decided that we did want to invest
in this, we would slide to confirm that you know that yes you have acknowledged whatever the safety
warning is, and for this one since this is under $10 and that's how much I had put in my account,
we have these different options. So if I didn't want to buy in fractional shares, and I wanted
to buy a full share, we can see that we now have a market order, a limit order, or a stop order. If
you're not sure what those are, I do have another video going over the different order types,
but for example if we wanted to use a limit order, we would select that. We could set our price,
and then when the market opens tomorrow our trade would go through as long as it hits that price.
Now you can see that when I tried to click invest on that, the market order was
kind of faded out. That's because currently when I'm filming this, the market is closed.
So another way that you can see, like, if you're not sure what time it is for some
reason or if you're not sure if the markets are open, you can go back just to your main screen
that little night or moon icon in the top left corner means that the market is closed and it
will tell you how long until the market is open again. So again just kind of a cool feature. So
if you want to follow someone, if you wanted to follow me, what you can do is go to that search
icon and search for whoever you're looking for. So if we wanted to follow JJ Buckner, we could
type in his name and he pops up right there. I'm already following him but you would just click
that follow or unfollow button. If you want to see your own profile and change your little bio you
go to that little person account icon, and then you would click your icon in the top left corner,
and that's where you have the option to edit that description. After you have all of that set up if
you decide hey I actually don't want people to be able to see my portfolio, I don't want
people to be notified when I'm trading something, then what you can do is go back one screen, click
on that gear icon for the settings, and then when you scroll down to the social part you can choose
whether or not you share your portfolio publicly, and you can choose whether or not you share your
trades. So you can just toggle those on and off at any time if you decide that you do or don't want
to share your portfolio. If we wanted to start a group with someone you could go to that little
direct message paper airplane icon. You can start a conversation, you can create a new group,
and invite whoever you want to chat with in the app. So it's a pretty cool app, if you do want to
see a more in depth review or in depth comparison let me know in the comments and don't forget to
use the link in the description to get your $10 of that free stock. Let me know if you sign up,
and also let me know what you choose to invest that $10 in and I will see you guys next time.