4 Millennial-Friendly Ways to Invest from Your Smartphone (for $100 or Less)

1. Stash

Stash is another app that directly targets Millennials with low minimums and easy navigation. You simple choose a portfolio according to your interests.

(As an interesting aside, news recently hit that the app raised $40 million, per Reuters.)

While Robinhood (discussed below) lets you pick and choose the actual company you want to invest in, Stash functions more like an ETF or mutual fund.

“Starting with as little as $5, users can pick from a batch of over 30 exchange-traded-funds curated by the company’s investment team.”

As of today, Stash services 850,000 accounts, with half a million investors joining the platform since January. And get this: Nearly 90% percent of its users are first-time investors, according to Stash.

“We help people who don’t have a lot save money on a weekly basis,” CEO and co-founder Brandon Krieg said in an interview. “Stashers look like America, they look like people you meet every day: they are nurses and teachers and Uber and Lyft drivers.”

Only downside here is that if you don’t add to your $5, fees will wipe out your account pretty quickly. So make sure you add as you go or sign up for the automatic saving option.

• What: A micro-investment app (iOS and Android) with over 30 ETFs according to industry, sector and risk tolerance.
• How it works: Download the app and choose your investment.
• Minimum investment: $5
• Cost: Fees range from $1 a month for accounts under $5,000 to 0.25% a year.

2. Acorns

This is actually a pretty cool tool that takes away the headache of investing and automatically does it for you every time you make a debit or credit card purchase, sort of like a mini robo-advisor of sorts.

Much like Stash, users can choose between six portfolios from conservative (mainly bonds) to aggressive (stocks only). The money’s then parked in various index funds managed by big-name money managers like Vanguard and $5.4 trillion juggernaut BlackRock.

Or as the LA Times put it, Acorns “rounds off customers’ credit or debit card purchases to the nearest dollar and invests the difference into stocks and bonds.”

The idea is that while you invest, the loose change goes towards a nice nest egg.

“We’re not trying to preach austerity to the client, because that’s a bummer,” Acorns chief commercial officer Manning Field said. “Some people will say, ‘Don’t have the cup of coffee.’ We’ll tell you to have the cup of coffee and invest along the way.”

• What: iOS and Android app.
• How it works: Download the app and choose one of six index funds.
• Minimum investment: $5
• Cost: Just like Stash, fees range from $1 a month for accounts under $5,000 to 0.25% a year.

3. Robinhood

A commission-free investment tool targeting Millennials, this Snoop Dogg-backed app launched in December 2014 to allow “average Joes” and young investors to get into the game.

Traditionally, if you wanted to invest you typically had to call brokers at E*Trade or Charles Schwab, companies that charge $7 to $10 fees per trade. (And those fees add up…quickly.)

Built by a 30-year old, the commission-free app has 2 million Millennial users (30’s the average age) with a cool $1.3 billion valuation. According to CEO Vlad Tenev, they’ve saved over $500 million in commissions.

(Here’s a Business Insider tutorial on how you actually use it.)

“Brokerages and banks generally concentrate on how they can make the most money from each customer,” Tenev said in a recent interview. “If you focus on extracting the most value out of a customer, naturally you’re going to ignore everyone but the wealthiest 1% of the population.”

And if you do do it, getting into real estate stocks (REITs, short for real estate investment trusts) actually offers you the quickest and cheapest way to real estate ownership, my personal favorite.

(If you want to get a fast start, here’s Forbes’ list of nine REITs with yields between 8% and 10%.)

• What: A commission-free investment app (iOS and Android).
• How it works: Download and start buying stocks.
• Minimum investment: Whatever stock you want to buy.
• Cost: Free.

4. Online Advisors & Newsletters

If you do pick the stocks yourself, you have to know which ones to pick—but be careful.

There are numerous, no-name newsletters out there designed to manipulate markets and rip off naive investors with worthless penny stock companies (think Wall of Wall Street) going nowhere fast.

However, once you look beyond the names you’ve never heard of, there are some serious gems out there that can help drive returns—especially if you go the Robinhood route where you pick the stocks yourself.

In doing so, the top newsletters have developed a reputation of predicting trends and produce strong investor yields by uncovering great trades.

Agora Financial’s Technology Profits Confidential is a newsletter that’s gotten play on Wall Street Journal, CNBC and Bloomberg and boasts an average 66.58% gain over the past 12 months.

Editor Ray Blanco says a good financial newsletter is best as an “idea generation source” for new investors, to let them know which stocks to invest in, when, and why.

“It’s also best if the newsletter editor avoids trading in the companies he or she covers, again to avoid any conflicts,” Blanco says. “That’s also what separates a good newsletter from a bad one—conflict of interest.”

• What: Online newsletters and education platforms.
• How it works: An investor subscribes and gets advice, articles and recommendations on which stocks to buy, when and why.
• Minimum investment: N/A
• Cost: Legit ones range from $99 a year to $79 per month.

What are your favorite technologically-savvy ways to invest? Any interesting apps you’d add to this list?

Comment below!