﻿Alright, everybody, I’m Logan Allec, I’m a CPA, and today I’m reviewing the Public
Investing app. This is one of those apps that’s currently giving away free money for signing up
and opening an account, if after you watch this video you think Public is a good app for you,
you’re welcome to use my link in the description below to get that bonus,
this review is not sponsored, by the way, Public doesn’t even know I’m doing this,
yes I have a referral link, but this is not sponsored, this video is completely objective
and just sharing my opinion on the Public app as a user of it, I will share with you how the
app works, how to buy stock in the app, and then later in the video I will provide a summary of
the things I like about Public and the things I don’t like, so be sure to stick around for that.
And just as a reminder if you like free stocks, you can also check out the video I made recently
where I tell you the eleven brokerages that are giving away free stock right now, but let’s get
into the review, let’s start out with what is Public? Public claims to be “a whole new way to
invest” in that it “makes the stock market social.” It says you can “follow other investors,
discover companies to believe in, and invest with any amount of money.” So what does this mean,
this whole “social” aspect of investing? Let’s start from the top, you download Public,
it’s pretty easy, use my link in the description below, click install, you click get started,
input your phone number, they send you an authentication code, input that, input your name
and a username, your email address, create a password, choose a profile photo,
and then here’s where the free stock comes in, unlike other investing apps like Webull
or Robinhood or Firstrade or Dough that give you a specific share of stock, an entire share,
Public’s promotion is to give you “up to” five dollars of a particular stock, a fractional share,
which Public calls slices. So when I signed up I picked Tesla, and then you have to actually set up
your brokerage account, birthdate, citizenship status, marital status, number of dependents,
the typical questions you’re asked when setting up a brokerage account, your employment status,
address, your full name, your social security number, and agreeing to the terms and conditions.
This is all very typical, these is all required information to set up a brokerage account in the
United States. Then Public asks you about your investing goals and experience, your annual
income and net worth, and then you make your first deposit, you can easily link your bank,
they use Plaid, I was able to link my Chase account within minutes, I made my initial deposit
of one hundred dollars, which even though it hadn’t transferred yet obviously Public still
gave me buying power of $100. Then Public asks you to pick your interests, what you’re interested in,
this informs the news you’ll see on your home feed in Public, and then that’s it, now you can check
out the Public app, so here it is, “Welcome to Public. Own the companies you believe in.”
In the middle of the screen there you see ticker symbols for companies that Public thinks
based on what you said you might be interested in, and then below that you see posts that look a lot
like tweets from people in the Public community, they even have a blue checkmark type thing,
although here it looks like a black checkmark encircled in blue, anyway that top one here is
from Katie Perry, no, not Katy-With-a-Y Perry, this is Katie-With-an-I-E-Perry,
she’s the vice president of marketing at Public, and basically these posts are people sharing their
thoughts about investing, you can click on their names and see their profile and their portfolio,
here is someone named Nadia Vanderhall, she owns a marketing company, you can see her portfolio,
that’s the stocks she’s actually invested in in Public, you can also see her watchlist, those are
the stocks that she’s keeping an eye on, themes I think are just the general broad categories she’s
interested in, you can click a theme like “Space Exploration” and see all the stocks in there,
and of course form people’s profiles you can see all their posts that they’ve posted. Now,
you probably had no idea who Katie-With-an-I-E-Perry or Nadia Vanderhall were
before you watched this video, but one cool thing is there are celebrities on here, you can see what
they’ve invested in through Public, if you tap the magnifying glass, you can scroll through
people to follow, here’s adult contemporary sensation of the last century Michael Bolton,
there’s also Shaquille O’Neal, and I don’t want to imply that because these people are celebrities
you should pay particular attention to their investment pics, I mean, come on, Michael Bolton
is a musician and Shaq is an athlete, I don’t want to imply that oh their stock picks are
good just because they’re celebrities, but it’s just interesting, and many people obviously like
to know what’s going on in celebrities’ lives, their dogs or whatever, well here’s an opportunity
to get a glimpse into celebrities’ lives in terms of investing. And just to be clear,
the portfolio on people’s profiles in Public is just the stocks they own using the Public app,
it’s not their entire stock portfolio. I also saw a YouTuber on here, Roberto Blake, he YouTubes
about YouTube and how to grow a YouTube channel, so it was cool to see him on here, I’ll tag him
in the description below if you want to check out his channel. Alright, what else? If you click the
little present, the little gift at the bottom of the screen in the center, you can get your
invite link to invite others to Public, you’re both rewarded with a free slice of stock if you
do that, next to the present icon is the little messages box because you can directly message
other users, and then you have the profile icon there at the bottom right, where you can click
Account Details and see more information about your account, one more thing I want to mention is
the Public Account settings, if you click the gear in the top right, you’ll see a bunch of things,
scroll down and you’ll see where you can download your statements and tax documents,
manage your transfers to and from Public, you can click “Update Account” to update your account,
your profile picture, your bio and what not, but the one I really want to draw your attention to
is dividend reinvestment, if you click on that, this is where you can tell Public what to do with
dividends earned in your Public account, I believe the default is to simply deposit the dividends
into your Public account and not invest them, which is the bottom option here, but I actually
prefer to have my dividends I earn from a particular stock reinvested into that stock,
so I chose the “auto-reinvest my dividends” option here. OK, so that is the Public app,
now let’s talk about how the heck do you actually buy a stock in Public? It’s actually super easy,
you just go to the magnifying glass, in the search bar at the top type of the name of the
company you want to invest in, in this case Amazon, click it when it pops up, then click
“Trade” in the bottom right, then click “Buy”, and then you can choose how much you want to buy, you
can do a custom amount by choosing “A Different Amount” or you can just go with one of the round
options they suggest, so I invested my entire one hundred dollar cash balance into Amazon, and the
cool thing is with Public and these fractional shares, and this isn’t unique to Public at all,
other brokerages do this, but the share price of Amazon right now is like three thousand dollars,
but with Public you can just invest whatever you have with no minimums,
Public actually has no minimums, so that’s cool, right, you have a dollar, you can invest
in Amazon. Note that I was not given the option to place a limit order because I was investing
in fractional shares. If I had enough money in my Public account to buy one whole share of Amazon,
Public would have given me the option to set the limit price on my buy, that’s the maximum
price I would be willing to pay for a share of Amazon stock, but I didn’t have that option
because it was an order of a fractional share, that’s not a Public thing, that’s a stock market
thing. Alright, now let’s talk Public App pros and cons, let’s start with the pros. Pro Number 1:
Public is free. No monthly subscription fee, no commissions on your stock purchases, it’s free
to use and sign up. Pro Number 2: They give you a signup bonus, like I mentioned earlier, if you use
my link in the description below, you will get a free slice of stock from Public when you sign up
using my link. Pro Number 3: I just talked about this, but there are no minimums with Public,
Public like many other investing apps these days is making investing in the stock market
accessible to everyone. Pro Number 4: Fractional shares, this is another thing I just talked about,
but even if you deposit a dollar into Public, you can buy a fractional share of a ton of different
companies, Amazon, Apple, Tesla. And finally Pro Number 5: The social aspect, this can be
a pro and a con, as I’ll talk about in the con section next, but just the way the app is set up,
when you open up Public for the first time, what do you see, what’s on your home screen in Public?
It’s not your account, yeah, it’ll tell you how your account’s doing at the top,
but what you see really on the home screen mostly is this social interaction, people sharing their
thoughts on the market, on various stocks and what not, and that’s unique, no other investment
app that I know of does this as well as Public is doing. So why is this a good thing? Well, I look
at it like this. If you’re addicted to social media, and many of us are, including myself,
I think it’s a great thing if instead of getting your social media fix just by mindlessly scrolling
through Instagram looking at pictures of the new lizard of some random person you said hi to three
times in high school, you can get that social media fix on Public by joining the conversation,
the “public” conversation about stocks and investing. Now, that can also be a bad thing,
so now let’s talk about the cons. Con Number One: The social media aspect of this. Now,
I just said that could be a good thing, and yes, that’s absolutely true. But, but if you’ve been
following my channel for a while, if you’ve taken my Prosper course, link in the description below,
you know my main approach when it comes to investing is set it and forget it
because I don’t really want you fiddling with your portfolio all the time for a couple reasons,
one is that you’ll probably have higher returns in the long run by just setting and forgetting
your investing rather than becoming obsessed with tracking the stock market,
and two, because I’d rather you spend time doing something more productive like working on your
career or starting a side hustle or something like that to generate more income for you to dump into
your set-it-and-forget-it investments rather than spending hours and hours of your life every week
tracking the market. And there’s another component here on Public with the whole celebrity thing, you
might be tempted to think because, “Oh, if you’re my mom, oh, Michael Bolton invested in this,
I’m going to invest in this too.” So what’s my point? Take the Public social media aspect with
a grain of salt, that’s all I’m saying. Con Number Two: No desktop trading, all trading must be done
on the app, I know that’s not a big deal for many of you, but many people just like to do their
investing on their computer because it’s faster and they can see more on-screen, you won’t get
that with Public, it is entirely app-based. Con Number Three: Public only offers taxable brokerage
accounts at this time. You can’t open up an IRA at Public, you can’t open up any other account
at Public than a taxable brokerage account. Con Number Four: Public does not offer margin trading,
which is where you can borrow against your portfolio to invest even more money in the
stock market, that’s obviously a risky strategy, all investments carry risk, and borrowing to
invest simply amplifies that risk along with the potential reward and return on your investment.
And finally Con Number Five: There’s no real auto-invest feature with Public. You have to
manually deposit money into Public then make your trade, that’s time-intensive,
and that’s not conducive to building out a long-term investment strategy and portfolio.
So would I recommend Public? Yeah, if you’re attracted to the community aspect of the app,
if that’s something that appeals to you, something that you can see yourself engaging in responsibly
and not getting super addicted to it and buying and selling stocks all day,
yeah, I think this can be a fun app to get started investing. But I personally wouldn’t make this my
main investing app, to me, this would be like a fun investing app, where I put my fun money,
about five percent of my portfolio is fun money, individual stocks, that’s where I take risks,
I might do more of that in Public. But it just doesn’t have the platform like say Fidelity,
where the vast majority of my stock portfolio is, where I can set up every account from a taxable
brokerage account to an IRA to a 529 to an HSA and Fidelity has all these research features
and tools, Public doesn’t have that, nor does it offer the features of a platform like M1 Finance,
which is my favorite investment app and brokerage to use these days, I am putting more
and more money into M1 Finance every day, that is where I can automate my investing
and truly build out my portfolio, speaking of which if you have not seen my M1 Finance review,
there is a link to it on the next screen, I highly encourage you to check out that video
as well, and there is also a link on the next screen to my video of all the places
where you can get free stocks right now, please be sure to watch both of those videos and in the
comment sections of those videos let me know what you think, and I will see you over there, buh-bye.