I have a few apps on my phone for investment. I thought that was a good way to dip my toes in the financial pools.
The first one is Acorns. The general way it works is you choose your risk tolerance, hook up a bank/credit card and for every amount you spend, it rounds up to the nearest dollar and deposits it for you. So spend $8.47 on lunch, $0.53 is invested. You can also have it invest the spare change plus a dollar or two, etc. so you save $1.53 or $2.53. I won't go into all the functionality. You invest in ETFs, which I gather are similar to mutual funds except ETFs trade during the day whereas mutual funds at the end. It adds up pretty quickly. It's still doing well under Trump, but the graph of my performance is interesting. Under Obama it was a fairly smooth parabola then Trump got in, and the graph now resembles a jagged mountain range.
Second one is Stash. This allows you more control over your investment, which is also in ETFs, but you can choose the type of investments you want to make. So I've invested in "portfolios" such as Equality Works (companies that support LGBT), Clean & Green (clean energies), Aggressive Mix (which is a blend of stocks and bonds that are for an aggressive investor), and Corporate Cannabis (exactly what it sounds like). Plus several others. Fifteen in all, which might be too much. You can read about what these groups do, what companies they invest in the most, see what kind of risk tolerance they are, and see past performances. You can either have an amount deducted from your bank each week for each group (I do $5 each), do it like Acorns with rounding, and maybe a combination. Not sure. They also have more traditional individual stocks you can invest in like Yahoo, Target, Best Buy, etc.
I'm an aggressive investor (was told by a financial counselor that there's never been a 12-year period where at the end the stock market wasn't higher than at the beginning so you might as well be aggressive when you're younger - that's another thing - talk to a financial person), but you should have a smattering of different risk tolerance portfolios. A few of mine - like Blue Chips - are no better than savings accounts, earning just a little.
If you do Stash, the one portfolio I would say get and maybe invest more money than the others is, "Roll with Buffett." You're buying shares of his holding company. Normally, it performs at 10% or better, but Trump ruins everything, and it's currently around 5.37%. My most volatile portfolio is the Corporate Cannabis one. I started investing in it when it wasn't doing well, but I believe in the future of medical marijuana and hemp. I went from being $50 under to around $150 over then back to $40 under and am now at $60 over.
Even if you go more traditional routes, these aren't a bad side-thing to throw some spare change at.
TlalocW
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