5 Best Investment Tools for Beginners

On the one hand, you have passive instruments like wealth management and mutual funds, where you have no say in what will happen to your money, all you can do is just hold and wait. For those starting out, it’s enough to invest in something like the S&P index or ETF.

On the other hand, if you want more personalization and more control you might find yourself in the open space of all the companies in the world. There are literally thousands of stocks you can buy. It’s impossible to learn and constantly be updated on every company and it’s very hard to pick the ones that suit your investment goals and interests. 

Investing tends to work best when you buy stocks of companies you love and see great potential in, whose products you use or value. Luckily there are new tools on the market that let you find the middle ground between these two approaches and make your life easier. Before we get into the top investment tools for beginners, let’s say a word or two about what kinds of investment tools exist in general.

Types of Investment Tools

In the world of finance when we speak of investment tools we can mean different things. Sometimes when we say investment tools we can mean types of investment assets, otherwise known as investment instruments.

We can be referring to types of assets like forex or securities, i.e. tradable assets. These include stocks, bonds, mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs), as well as derivatives (such as options and futures) and hedge funds. If you’re interested in finding out about some of the best investment tools for beginners in the sense of what to invest in, please take a look at this article.

On the other hand, we can be referring to services that help you make smarter, more informed decisions about the stocks you buy. These are services like the Motley Fool, Seeking Alpha, and Simply Wall St. The first two are some of the best investment tools for those who really want to learn and keep up with the news. They have a lot of free, useful content and offer premium subscriptions that will help you pick stocks. Simply Wall St is more focused on in-depth company analysis and doesn’t provide much free information. The premium subscriptions tend to be expensive but may be worth it if you’re really into stock picking.

When retail investing came about and changed the market, the concept of investment tools changed once again. The market of investments is moving fast and further away from traditional brokers thanks to apps like Robinhood that let investors access the world of trading right from their mobile phones. It seems like everyone is making investment tools for beginners these days.

In this article, we’d like to focus on mobile investing apps that might be interesting to beginner investors and relevant in the current market environment.

There are many tools on the market that cater to retail investors. Some are more social, some are more to do with thematic investing. Some are more passive and some let you have more control. Try a few to see what suits you best.

What are the best investment tools for beginners? Let’s take a look at some cool, modern ones, each with its own interesting twist.

What Are the Best Investment Tools for Beginners?

Acorns

Acorns is a cool concept that combines saving and investing. You can link up multiple bank accounts and invest your spare change, round up your purchases and invest that into diversified portfolios built by experts. You have no control over the portfolio itself, but you can choose between different ones. Users answer a few questions and fill in their investor profile and the app matches them to the right portfolio.

Pricing: $3 per month for an individual plan, $5 for a family plan.

Features:

• good for beginners
• helps you build good financial habits
• track your accounts in one place
• passive — no control over your investments

Alinea

Alinea is a social trading app that lets users invest what they believe in. They can invest in collections of investments called playlists. That way you can invest easily in a theme according to industries or causes to support what you believe in.

Users can see what their friends are investing in, curate their own playlists, and share them with each other. That makes it easy to reduce your risk instead of researching individual stocks in an industry you like.

It’s built by Gen Z for Gen Z, is simple to use and easy to understand. The app offers $0 commission when investing in stocks and ETFs and charges a 1% spread on crypto transactions.

Features:

• stock collections or playlists that let you invest in multiple companies at once
• see what others invest in with social functionality
• share stock playlists with others
• buy crypto

Pricing: No commission on stocks, 1% spread on crypto

Gainy

Ok let’s get this out of the way. We made this app, so we cannot be overly critical because we love it but we’ll try to be objective :)

Gainy offers a personalized discovery feed of individual stocks and TTFs — collections of stocks focused around a theme, cause, or investment strategy. These can be industry-specific like Agriculture or Cybersecurity, cause-specific like Woman-led companies or Clean energy, or strategy-specific, e.g. Inflation-proof or Monthly dividend. These get rebalanced automatically and the contents can be changed if a new relevant company becomes available or a stock is underperforming.

Users can invest in any TTF starting from $10 (coming in Q4 2022) and can also discover and buy TTFs created by top financial influencers.

The app also allows you to connect multiple brokerage accounts and track your portfolio in one place.

Features:

• Thematic Trading Fractional investing — TTFs
• smart recommendation engine based on questionnaire and usage
• discover stocks and collections that suit your portfolio and goals

Pricing: Free, 0.25% for assets under management

Iris

Iris is another social investing app that lets you see what your friends are investing in. The strong part is the friendly community. You can follow your friends’ portfolios and see whose portfolio is performing the best. You can get real-time notifications when your friends buy or sell stocks. You can DM other users and take part in group chats.

You can follow influencers and celebrity investors to see what stocks they are buying.

Features:

• see what other people are investing in
• DMs and group chats
• get real-time notifications when others make trades
• discover trending stocks

Pricing: free

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Getquin

Getquin lets you aggregate your investments in one place and interact with a community of other investors like you.

It lets you monitor your accounts and investments in one place.

You can get real-time quotes for stocks, crypto, forex and indices. You can create your personal profile like on any social media to interact with your friends and other people you meet.

Features:

• track and analyze your investments
• supports stocks, crypto, bonds, real estate, commodities etc.
• interact with community of like-minded investors

Pricing: free

There are a bunch of investing apps that can teach you about the stock market and invest from your phone. 

Our favorite trends are thematic investing and personalization. The best tools are those that help you identify the investments that work best for you, so you’ll want to hold a stock long-term, which is where most of the value of investing comes from.

Give these apps a try, hopefully they’ll help you become a better investor.

How Can the Gainy App Help?

In this noisy industry, if you’re not going to blow your own horn, nobody’s going to do it for you. So what’s unique about Gainy? It started as a personalized stock picking tool based on stock recommendations according to what people were searching for online and an onboarding questionnaire. 

Even though the unique set of metrics offers a different perspective on the market, which made Gainy very useful for stock picking, this is a super narrow niche. And we didn’t want to be just another one of those stock investment tools for beginners.

We soon realized that what the new generation of investors is interested in is investing in what they believe. That’s why we created Thematic Trading Tractional — our own approach to thematic trading. TTFs are thematic stock collections usually made up of 10-15 stock each focused around a specific theme, industry or investment strategy.

These let retail investors with no desire to spend hours upon hours of research, invest in solid thematic portfolios that work. For example, in Cybersecurity or Agriculture. Women-led companies or Cannabis. There is something for everyone there and we recommend you give it a try.

Our goal is to help investors, especially non-professionals to invest on autopilot and let go of time-consuming stock picking and some of the more HODL-type assets like ETFs.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully, this investment tools review has been helpful. There is no shortage of options on the market of investment tools and services for beginners. The best thing you can do is to try a few tools for investing before you decide what works for you. You need to enjoy using them regularly. They all offer slightly different things.
You may also want to explore other kinds of personal investment tools for beginners we didn’t discuss in detail like different investment instruments and all kinds of blogs and services that teach you the fundamentals of investing and what’s going on on the market.

Take a look on our blog, hopefully you’ll find a lot of interesting information to help you learn on this exciting path of becoming a smarter investor. All the best!