Investing in the stock market used to belong to people who were confident about what they were doing, found brokerages to use, and sometimes even called in over the phone to buy stocks. These days, investing in the market has become a lot easier because of the technology that is available at the touch of our fingertips.
Most people own a smartphone in today’s society and that enables them to access a ton of brokerages and stock information, like Phil Mickleson insider trading. Getting information like this wasn’t easily accessible in the past. There are five major ways that technology has made investing in stocks simple in today’s digital society.
Online brokerages
The concept of an online brokerage is one way that has really allowed more people to invest in the market by using technology. It’s made the idea of investing very simple. Instead of having to call into a brokerage to invest your money, you can just download the app and let the brokerage walk you through the process of investing. This makes investing easy because of how simple it is. There’s less human-to-human interaction and more visual learning taking place in the comfort of an investor’s own home.
No longer does a potential investor have to listen to a phone conversation about how they can and can’t invest their money. Online brokerages through apps have also made it easier to access other brokerages that many investors weren’t previously aware of. There a ton of brokerages that investors can access both online and in-person and just as many that can be accessed only online. The options have really increased since technology has made a splash on the investment scene.
More competition
Technology has made brokerages become more competitive with each other which has led to more innovation and better results for investors. Some of the updates one brokerage does will be copied by other brokerages until it’s universally a feature that most brokerages can do. Competition among brokerages can be seen in the earlier years of investing when they started rolling out investment apps for customers to use. Brokerages saw how easy it was for other brokerages to attract investors to the platform by holding creating an app and created one. This made it easier for investors and brokerages. Now there is a variety of great investing and business apps available for all investors to use.
Fractional shares
As part of the innovation that came with brokerages competing for more investors, fractional shares became a popular thing. This made it easier for investors to purchase pieces of their favorite companies without actually having to buy an entire stock. Fractional shares started in the digital age of investing online and have become more popular over the years. Investors like to get a little piece of every stock they like and that can more easily be obtained by using fractional shares.
Commission-free trading
One of the major enhancements of the age of technology has been commission-free trading. It was unheard of to offer investors trades without commissions in the past but now, almost every major brokerage offers it through their apps. It was something that competition brought out in many of the brokerages because they saw how many customers it brought to their platforms.
One company started out first doing it for years and then others picked up on it because they needed to keep up with the clients they were losing from it. So many of the younger, millennial investors were using commission-free trading straight from their smartphones that other brokerages had to join the crowd and start offering it for everyone. Some apps give you a certain number of commission-free trades a week and others only let you do it once a day.
Recurring investments
In the past, it was much more difficult to set up recurring investments. The New York Times calls it winning by being lazy. Basically, you can set your account to automatically invest your money a certain amount every day or week. This makes it easy to dollar cost average your investments and put more money into the market without ever having to think about it. It was much more difficult to do this before in the past.
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