 What is going on everybody is Stas here welcome back to another video so in this video we're going to be doing a complete overview a complete review of M1 Finance a complete unbiased review of M1 Finance taking a look at pros of the platform cons of the platform why I personally like it and we're also going to be taking a look at the mobile app as well as the desktop app so you can see how the platform looks on a cell phone because we all have cell phones nowadays right and as well as a desktop so with that further ado guys let's talk about it let's hop into it M1 Finance review alrighty guys so here we are in my M1 Finance portfolio this is actually on the desktop so when you log into your computer on your laptop on your desktop whatever it may be this is what the portfolio is going to be looking like and by the way guys you need $100 to start out an M1 Finance portfolio and once you put in that $100 you'll be able to start investing in stocks and in ETFs so once you log in this is what you see right you see your pie here which is actually one of the most important and unique functions of M1 Finance which we'll get to here in a couple of minutes you see your portfolio's value and performance here in terms of dollar value and in terms of percentage over different specified time periods so right now you can see my gain on my portfolio is 88 cents for a return of 0.72% over the span of its existence and you guys can see I started my portfolio here on July 2nd and you can see the yearly performance the quarterly performance the monthly performance the weekly performance and the daily performance of your portfolio and down here you guys can see the different slices that I have that I own that make up my personal pie right and again we'll talk about the pie here in a couple of minutes so you have my slices here you know 3M, Altria, AT&T, Vanguard, FTSE, Developed Markets Fund and then Alibaba right so that is what the you know first page looks like you can see here you have cash $125 that shows your cash balance money that is ready to deploy either into stocks or into ETFs and if you see up here you can see a couple of other tabs you have activity your account value how much cash you have your recent orders your recent trades your recent deposits stuff like that you have a holdings tab which shows you again what you own in terms of your portfolio stocks or ETFs and then you have the funding tab which it shows you your bank account you obviously can't see mine right but you can see the M1 finance account value again you can deposit withdraw set up upcoming transfers and stuff like that you can also see $125 again is how much I have in cash so going back over here to the portfolio tab let's talk about the pie function that M1 finance includes in its product in its brokerage and this is very very awesome guys again for people that don't necessarily want to be extremely involved in investing right so let's go to edit very quickly and you can see my pie here my initial pie where I broke it down into 20 slices amongst five different positions so let's say you start your M1 finance portfolio you start you know picking out your slices you can literally construct whatever amount of you know slices you want with whatever amount of percentage value you want for each one of those slices so let's say hypothetically here I want to add a couple of stocks right you can see there's a bunch of filters market capitalizations PE ratio dividend yield you can do whatever you want based on your particular criteria for those stocks but for the sake of this video let's make it quick let's say we want to add visa into this add to the basket right so you click add and now you see visa is at 0% so you're going to have to take some you know percentage value or away from some of these other stocks so visa can be added into your portfolio so let's say we want to take away 10% from 3M and we want to take 10% away from Alibaba so we can squeeze a 20% position here on visa right okay boom visa is right there so let's say we want to add another position now let's say we want to add Disney right Disney is a company we want to invest in let's add Disney into the pie so you can see it's at 0% here let's say we want to take away some from Altria let's say we want to take 10% from Altria and only make Disney a 10% stake of the portfolio you can do that you can add it 10% and then you can click save and once you click save guys it says are you sure you want to make changes in your portfolio any removed slices will be sold during the next trading window and you may be asking yourself what does that mean well the awesome thing about M1 Finance is it auto invests your money if you want it to based on the slices in your portfolio and you guys can see I have auto invest off right now so let's say I wanted to have M1 Finance really just invest my money based on the slices that I have automatically I can literally just turn auto invest all my cash on and literally read this guys if my cash balance exceeds 10 dollars M1 will automatically invest my entire cash balance so the whole entire idea of this is to put money in forget about it and then M1 Finance automatically invests it for you basically based on what the slices in your pie include and that is if you wanted to write if you wanted to auto invest sure let it auto invest but if you don't like I personally don't want it to I click don't auto invest my cash M1 will not automatically invest any of my cash which I personally like because I'm more active I like being more hands-on with my portfolio in terms of building it and managing it so another awesome thing about M1 Finance is that it allows you to rebalance your portfolio whenever you want when certain slices in your pie either get overweight or underweight right and let me just you know elaborate a bit on this so you remember my personal pie you know is 20% split across five different slices right that equals 100 percent that is my total pie value and let's say you can clearly see now this is on purpose but let's say I didn't want my 3M position to be 34% that's very very overweight you know I can hit this rebalance button and literally look what it says guys during the next trading window M1 will buy underweight slices and sell overweight slices to bring your pie back to its target so if I clicked confirm here guys that would sell off 3M and then feed it into my underweight positions which in this case are AT&T VEA and BABA right and it'll also sell off some MO because MO Altria Group it's also a bit overweight right so it'll take some of Altria and then buy some more AT&T VEA and BABA but me again I did this purposely right I wanted 3M and Altria to have more weight because these in my opinion are more undervalued in terms of the other positions that I own but if you wanted to have that rebalance feature done for you automatically all you need to do is click the rebalance button and it'll literally shift your portfolio back to the original slices back to your original percentage slices which is awesome so over here on the research tab you can see markets you see the SPY which is an ETF that tracks the S&P, DIA which tracks the Dow Jones and the QQQ ETF that tracks the NASDAQ 100 you see a bunch of news here regarding the markets different stocks the economy and so forth and another awesome thing about M1 Finance is yes you can make your own pies like we talked about earlier in this video but you can also see expert pies guys this is one of the coolest things in my opinion that you can do so let's say you want to do general investing there's pies for general investing you can plan for retirement there's target date funds that you can look at there just stocks and bonds responsible investing but one thing that I personally think is awesome is you can do and look at pies that are hedge fund pies you can see Berkshire Hathaway here which is pretty much Warren Buffett's portfolio you can literally add this to the portfolio to your personal portfolio and invest in the same companies that Warren Buffett and Berkshire do if you personally want to right if you look down here you can see the different slices this one has 24 slices and the target of each slice you have 24% for apple 13% for Bank of America 10% for Coca-Cola 10% for Wells Fargo and the list goes on right and if you go back to expert pies you know other hedge fund followers you can look at icon capital for example you know you can add that to your portfolio you can see the different slices you know icon enterprises LP 53% CVR energy 12% and the list goes on you can also see how many holdings the dividend yield for the portfolio the expense ratio there's just a bunch of different things to look at that I don't want to spend too much time on this video because it'll make the video way too long but just know that M1 has a bunch of portfolios and different pies to take a look at so maybe you can even get some ideas for your own portfolio if you want to build your own pie right and over here you have my pies this is the one that I personally have here stocerfest portfolio but you can also make new pies and really just experiment in that sense as well there's a watch list here Apple Facebook you know I have some growth ETFs some other ETFs here the vanguard total stock market noble which is actually a dividend aristocrats ETF just watching a bunch of different things so when the time comes when the opportunity presents itself I will you know bite and you know invest into those different stocks and ETFs when the price is looking right so now that we saw a bunch of the main specs about M1 finance in terms of the desktop platform and before we actually get into the mobile platform on my cell phone let's talk about some pros and cons very quickly about M1 finance some that I'm personally I'm experiencing here and really just developed over the past couple of weeks of using the platforms so one thing that I really like about M1 finance is you're allowed to have partial shares of companies if you notice here my teeny tiny portfolio of $150 I actually don't own a whole share of any company right 3m I own 0.29 shares Altria I own 0.72 AT&T I own 0.59 vea 0.47 0.11 for Alibaba and this is something very very beneficial to those out there that are just starting out investing that don't really have more than a hundred two hundred three dollars to invest but still want to own some of these stocks that are higher in price so for example you know these stocks they aren't crazily expensive but for example some other companies that are expensive are Google and Amazon those shares are literally thousands of dollars Amazon is two thousand dollars per share at the time that I'm recording this video so buying fractional shares of Amazon with M1 finance is super important for everybody out there that wants to invest in Amazon but doesn't have a lot of money to invest so partial shares I love that and also it's a discount broker I love that as well you don't have to pay money each time you buy and you don't have to pay money each time you sell which is also very awesome for those out there that are starting out with a smaller account balance because let's say you have a an account with fidelity or TD Ameritrade where you're being charged five six seven dollars for a trade this adds up it eats into your profits and if you're starting out with a hundred two hundred dollars you know that five ten dollars you're spending on commissions you know that is going to be eating into your profits and you need to make a certain percentage back on your investment simply to cover the commissions so those are two key benefits in my opinion to M1 finance so one of the main cons that I've realized about M1 finance is when you actually buy a stock you don't get it at the exact price that it is listed right then and there on the exchanges you have to actually wait until the next trading window to buy a stock so let's say for example you know I wanted to buy more AT&T right now I'd click on AT&T I'd click buy let's say I wanted to buy for example let's say another fifteen dollars of AT&T and let's just buy fifteen dollars now for the sake of the video you click buy rather than sell obviously and you can see it's minus fifteen on your buy orders that'll take your cash down my cash down to a hundred and ten dollars I click continue and now it says during the next trading window so that is not necessarily the price of AT&T right now it's going to be what the price of AT&T is tomorrow right so that is one thing that I personally you know don't like too much about M1 finance but again this is built for people that are longer term investors this is not for trading stocks due to this reason right you couldn't trade stocks if you don't get the stock at the exact price right because that would just cause a lot a lot of mayhem in your account right so this is mainly for long-term investors and if you have a long-term outlook you know the couple of cents that you're missing here from not buying it at the exact price it is now and buying it in the next trading window it's not going to make too crazy of a difference but it's still in my opinion one of those things that is a bit of a con here another con is that if you do want to use the rebalance function here on M1 finance it's going to cause a taxable event each time you do that and I am not a CPA by any means this is not accounting advice whatsoever this is just what I've researched what I've experienced and what I've learned briefly using the M1 finance portfolio if you click rebalance and it sells 3M and let's say you haven't been holding 3M for more than a year that is going to cause a short-term capital gains tax where you're going to be taxed at your tax bracket and not at the long-term rate of 15% but let's say you hold the position for more than a year and then you rebalance it then it'll be a long-term capital gains of 15% but for those of you all that are new you're rebalancing every single week every two three weeks just understand you are causing a short-term capital tax gain there and you're going to have to pay ultimately more in taxes than you would have if you held the position and you didn't rebalance for at least one year alrighty guys so now that we talked about the desktop application we talked about some pros and we talked about some cons about M1 finance and we saw some specs about it let's take a look at the mobile application here so once you log in once you put in your credentials this is what the main page is going to look like at the top you're going to have your pie you're going to have your portfolio and it's going to break it down into the slices that make up your pie right and you can click between all of the different slices so you can see the value of those slices the weight they hold in your portfolio and how much they've gone up and how much they've gone down since you've purchased into those particular slices those different stocks and ETFs and if you go up here to the top left you go to activity you can see your pending orders you can see buy orders sell orders deposits how much cash you have and how much your portfolio is worth and if you go down here to holdings it shows you all of your different holdings stocks ETFs the total amount of holdings the total value of your portfolio and how much the portfolio has appreciated or depreciated since it's inception and if you go down here to funding you can see your bank account obviously you can't see my bank account but you can see yours there once you do log in withdraw deposit your activity funding history account transfers account scheduled transfers stuff like that right and if you go back up here to portfolio you go to research this is where you can see all of your different pies even pies that you haven't used yet in any portfolios and if you go up here to you know news you can actually search different stocks different funds expert pies you have the S&P 500 here the Dow the QQQ which tracks the NASDAQ and a bunch of other different news and if we go back here you can see you know individual stocks right if you want to search individual stocks you have funds a bunch of different ETFs you can take a look through and do research on and of course the expert pies that you can take a look at for yourself you have the hedge fund ones that we talked about before you have you know responsible investing you have you know planning for retirement based on what date you plan on retiring and based on whether you're aggressive conservative moderate there's a bunch of different investment styles that are created into pies for you you know based on however you want to invest so there's a bunch of cool things that you can really look at here and again you can see your pies and your watch list so when it comes down to the mobile application that is what it looks like it's very crisp it's very easy to use and very very easy to understand all right guys so that's it for the M1 finance review I really hope you did find value in this video and if you want to actually sign up for M1 finance you could get $20 by simply signing up and funding the account with the hundred dollars in the month of July so the link is down below in the description box it's also pinned down below in the comment section it is a referral link you will be helping me directly if you do use it I really do appreciate if you do so I'll catch you all in the next video thanks again for watching drop a like leave a comment subscribe for future content peace out