Anyone else here a Stash user, or use a similar investment app like robinhood or acorns? I've had it for 6 months and made over $500.

1/23/2018 4:28:07 PM

i use robinhood. i am pretty satisfied with it overall.

1/23/2018 4:44:42 PM

MJX (the cannabis ETF) is supposed to become available on Stash tomorrow, but I heard it's already been on robinhood for a while. How is it doing there?

1/23/2018 5:35:13 PM

Been with Acorns since a bit before Christmas, already have $150ish put away.

1/24/2018 9:22:50 AM

Whats the deal with robinhood? Does it have a similar pricing scheme to Stash/Acorn?

Why choose these over just ETF's with Fidelity/Vanguard?

1/24/2018 11:09:26 AM

^I like Stash because you as much as you want without worrying about price per share. I'm not sure if the typical financial firms let you do that. I'm also a big fan of the app in general, pretty easy to visualize how well I'm doing and where I could be getting more out of it.

I've put money in somewhat slowly over the past 6 months with a much bigger deposit in December (how I spent holiday gift money), and now I'm in for $5500 while only paying a $1 user fee per month. I've seen just about a 10% total return. It's free money, everyone should be doing it.

1/24/2018 7:28:59 PM

If anyone here decides to try Stash let me know and I'll refer you, we'll both get $5 free.

1/24/2018 7:41:06 PM

Quote :

"Why choose these over just ETF's with Fidelity/Vanguard?"

Because you can invest any amount of money (i.e. partial shares)

For small values in your account, its not a good idea. I think its $1 per month maintenance fee until you have $5,000...so you'd have to make a fairly big monthly return not to lose money for sums under a few hundred dollars. Not a bad idea as long as you dont just stick $50 in it or something, but you could probably do better with a bigger company for bigger dollar values. Its 0.25% yearly fee for accounts over $5,000.

There are no trading fees, IIRC, so there's that



[Edited on January 24, 2018 at 9:38 PM. Reason : ]

1/24/2018 9:28:13 PM

My top investments:

1/25/2018 1:29:14 AM

so its like facebook for investing..?

Thats an interesting concept, giving ETF's cute social names..

1/25/2018 10:36:22 AM

I'm not sure why you'd choose Stash over investing directly with Vanguard, Fidelity, or other fund company. While it's true you can't buy fractional shares on the market, a lot of ETFs allow you to buy fractional shares of the underlying funds directly. That 0.25% is pretty pricey too, and it's in addition to whatever fees the ETFs you've bought are charging.

If it's a choice between this and nothing, I'd definitely choose Stash. It just seems like you could do better with a minimal amount of work.

1/25/2018 12:29:06 PM

in general i think you'd be better off just directly investing in indexes or using betterment - interesting idea though

1/25/2018 12:59:18 PM

0.25% per year, with zero cost per transaction? I think that's pretty great.

From Fidelity's website:

Quote :

"$0 per trade for commission-free purchases of select Fidelity and iShares® ETFs $4.95 per trade for all other ETFs"

So it's only no cost if you limit yourself to only the ones they want you to buy (the ones they're affiliated with).

If you have less than $5k it's $1 per month, if you have $10k you pay $2.08 per month. I made 10 times that cost just today.

1/25/2018 3:57:14 PM

You're paying more than that. Your funds are expensive:

Defending America (ITA): 0.44%
Robots Rising (ROBO): 0.95%
Internet Titans (FDN): 0.54%
On Cloud Nine (SKYY): 0.60%
Social Media Mania (SOCL): 0.65%

Your screen shot doesn't show the entire portfolio but the weighted average annual expense ratio of what it does show is 0.81% (0.56% for the funds + 0.25% Stash). Thats $6.75 a month per $10k you have invested.

Granted you'll have to pay the funds regardless of where you hold them, but I bet you could look around and find cheaper ETFs and mutual funds with similar holdings. There are definitely cheaper investment strategies.

If Stash is the difference between you investing and not investing, and you're happy with it, that's great. Just know that what you're doing is not particularly cheap.

1/25/2018 4:45:41 PM

Quote :

"So it's only no cost if you limit yourself to only the ones they want you to buy (the ones they're affiliated with)."

Well, it is an ETF so there technically shouldn't be a lot of variation between Vanguard and Non-Vanguard other than the expense ratio for most indexes

1/25/2018 7:38:35 PM

Quote :

"You're paying more than that. Your funds are expensive: Defending America (ITA): 0.44% Robots Rising (ROBO): 0.95% Internet Titans (FDN): 0.54% On Cloud Nine (SKYY): 0.60% Social Media Mania (SOCL): 0.65%"

Yeah, if that's on top of the 0.25% flat fee, that's a lot of damn money and you'd be a lot better off just sticking some money in a Vanguard or Fidelity brokerage. That's very expensive and totally defeats the purpose of index investing on a cost basis


Also, seems kind of stupid to invest in a "Social Media ETF". Thats an awfully specific index to track. Also, if you use this service its likely you're not investing in other avenues and this is your entryway to investing. Open a Roth IRA (Or traditional IRA) instead since its tax advantaged. You do not need to open a taxable brokerage until you have maxed out tax advantaged accounts in most cases.


tldr; open a vanguard account instead


[Edited on January 25, 2018 at 7:48 PM. Reason : ]

1/25/2018 7:40:06 PM

So with ROBO, I'm losing 1.2% of my money each year. But in the 6 months I've owned it, the value of my investment has increased by nearly 15%. I'm still coming out ahead by quite a lot.

If my progress of the first 6 months with ROBO continues another 6 months (and increasing my investment at the same rate), I will have made $123 in gains and only lost $6.26 in expenses. Seems worth it.

This is my first venture into investing other than my retirement fund through Voya/ING. I appreciate the ease of it and I feel like I'm learning a lot.

Quote :

"Also, seems kind of stupid to invest in a "Social Media ETF". Thats an awfully specific index to track."

The top few companies the fund invests in, and how much of the fund goes to each:
Tencent 11.87%
Twitter 9.87%
Facebook 9.63%
Snap 5.15%

I feel comfortable with the growth of those companies for now.

[Edited on January 25, 2018 at 9:02 PM. Reason : -]

1/25/2018 8:59:33 PM

Quote :

"But in the 6 months I've owned it, the value of my investment has increased by nearly 15%"

The entire market is up 15% over the past six months. You're spending a lot of money for average performance.

Compounding is your friend. Don't discount 1.2%.

1/26/2018 12:04:15 AM

Fidelity "FUSEX" is up 22% in the past year, with a 0.09% exp ratio
Min investment of 2500, and no transaction fees.


I suppose I havent researched enough to see if Fidelity offers a "Social Media" etf, but I fail to see the need for one. The purpose of an ETF is to diversify?

1/26/2018 8:01:48 AM

Quote :

" suppose I havent researched enough to see if Fidelity offers a "Social Media" etf, but I fail to see the need for one. The purpose of an ETF is to diversify? "

Same question I had earlier in the thread. Seems to be an awfully specific ETF.

I know Vanguard and Fidelity offer things like Oil, Silver, etc ETF's, so those are very targeted as well. Still, those are much more established consumer staples and mature industries and/or inflation hedges. Social media etf seems risky to me to put a lot into...potential for a lot of growth too, I suppose

1/26/2018 12:19:47 PM

Quote :

"The entire market is up 15% over the past six months. You're spending a lot of money for average performance. Compounding is your friend. Don't discount 1.2%."

1/26/2018 1:58:22 PM

Quote :

"Min investment of 2500"

Which is why I started with Stash. When I hit 10k worth of savings I'll probably cash out and move it to somewhere more traditional. But for starting out this was definitely the right thing for me.

1/26/2018 2:20:19 PM

i'm not trying to rag on you at all...do whatever you want with your money. but i'm pretty sure Schwab has very low minimums for most of their accounts

1/26/2018 3:03:21 PM

^ Schwab minimum of 1000. Have my wife in some of those, rates are very low also (0.11%)

^^ I am glad you are investing something, It's definitely a step in the right direction. Do what works for you.
Just keep in mind - its not "free money". You are taking some risk, so be prepared if things stop going as awesome as they are at some point.

1/26/2018 3:31:53 PM

^for some reason i was thinking it was even less than $1000, but you are correct.

1/26/2018 3:59:31 PM

Quote :

"Which is why I started with Stash. When I hit 10k worth of savings I'll probably cash out and move it to somewhere more traditional. But for starting out this was definitely the right thing for me."

That's a good plan!

1/26/2018 8:49:18 PM

I love Robinhood. There are no trading fees which is fantastic. They've also just announced they are adding zero fee crypto trading. I think they said 16 different crypto currencies will be available to invest in.
The thing I really like about it is the ease of swing trading with relatively low amounts of capital, and not having to pay a fee. I thought there would be some kind of catch with the $0 trading fees, but there's not at all.
They also give you a free stock if you refer somebody to the app. Both the referring account and the new account signing up receive a free stock. If you're going to sign up for Robinhood use this link and it will give us both a free stock, and it's usually a good one. I had a friend get a share of Apple for free from RH. Here's the link to use if you want to sign up and get the free stock:

https://share.robinhood.com/donalds345

1/27/2018 3:41:29 PM

Market has been way down all week but finally had a good day today.

2/1/2018 11:12:07 PM

^^ the catch is that moving money in/out seems to take longer than other sites, but this isn't really a deal breaker.

2/2/2018 12:44:50 AM

^it was like that at first. now when you make a bank transfer into robinhood it's instantly available to trade with those funds (up to $1000, i think). now, the funds don't truly go through until a couple days later. but you can trade with them immediately.

2/2/2018 7:04:39 AM

Quote :

"finally had a good day today"

2/2/2018 2:11:55 PM

Been using Acorns for a few weeks. I like the roundup feature that you can link to multiple cards so however you spend money, you end up always adding a little bit to your Acorns account.

2/8/2018 8:46:47 AM

^yes, but not enough control over investments; only a generic risk based profile.

2/9/2018 7:22:14 AM

I downloaded Robinhood today and put $100 in.

What should be my first move?

2/12/2018 1:37:02 PM

to realize that in general day traders that aren't experienced lose money day trading - stick it in a vanguard index and watch it grow - it's not as exciting but it works

then figure out how to put more in

2/12/2018 2:37:46 PM

These apps shouldn't be used for day-trading anyway. Put in money then let it ride.

2/12/2018 10:36:43 PM

robinhood limits users to 5 day trades

2/13/2018 7:43:53 AM

Acorns Found Money feature could be useful occasionally. I'll need to drop like $600 on tires soon, ordering through Discount tires will get me a 3% investment. Nothing to get too excited about but free money is free money.

2/13/2018 12:14:37 PM

Stash started selling single companies today. I bought Amazon, Microsoft, Disney, Facebook, Netflix, and Nvidia.

2/27/2018 5:21:27 PM