Many people assume that investing takes quite a bit of money and effort. This perception often has roots in the past when brokerages had $30 trade fees, required account minimums, and had various other rules that made it difficult for casual traders to begin investing. Those days are gone. Now, we have brokers with $0 trading fees, no account minimums, and even permitting partial share ownership. You can even get free stocks just for signing up!
Getting free shares for opening an account means that you can get started investing – no matter how much or how little you might have. Even if the free shares are your investment portfolio right now, they’re helping you begin your journey of investing and wealth accumulation.
Why Is It Essential To Start Investing?
Before delving into the discussion of the brokers where you can get free stocks, let’s first take a step back to look at why investing is so essential. Investing and real estate are, by and large, the main ways to accumulate wealth. The historical average stock market return is a whopping 10%. Even accounting for inflation, that still means your money grows at a rate of 6-7% per year.
Where else can you get this level of return? You’re lucky to get 1% in a bank, either with an account or CD. You can start a business with your money, but that has its share of risks. Even real estate has plenty of risks, as well (not to mention the high cost of entry to start investing in real estate).
Practically speaking, investing in the stock market is the most immediate and tangible way to begin building wealth.
What Are All These “Get Free Stocks” Promotions?
Investing is essential to wealth accumulation, but most people haven’t participated in the market for various reasons. Initially, it was partly due to high commission fees. If you’re going to be paying $30 to buy stocks and $30 to sell them, you’d better be investing with enough to make that all worthwhile!
Over time, things have changed. Commissions have come down to $0, and many brokers now permit fractional share ownership. These changes have led to a revolution where individuals can buy, hold, and sell stocks with ease. The internet has democratized trading.
At the same time, there are now more brokers and platforms than ever. One way these platforms can get customers to join them over the competition is to offer an incentive. For many brokers, the motivation is obvious: giving owners of new accounts free stocks!
This change is subtle, and depending on the broker, it might not be that much in dollar value. However, the effect is profound.
You can start investing without risking any of your own money!
You can be a shareholder without touching a dime of your savings!
Imagine if these incentives existed in 2001 and you received two free shares of Amazon (worth $10 at the time). If you just held onto those two free shares, you’d be looking at having $6,600 at the time of this writing.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the top three online brokers where you can get free stocks!
Robinhood – Get Free Stocks
Robinhood has become one of the most well-known brokerages, thanks mainly to its intuitive website and app. This brokerage has many features that traders want, including margin trading, owning fractional shares, and trading options. If you’re interested, Robinhood also lets you buy cryptocurrencies.
It’s impossible to stress enough how much the app’s ease-of-use makes the investment experience enjoyable – especially for someone new to the stock market. The app provides plenty of hints and helpful content for people who are unfamiliar with investing terms and ideas (e.g., trailing stop order). For people new to investing, Robinhood is hard to beat.
There are a couple of downsides to Robinhood, though. First, Robinhood does not have any short selling options. Not having this capability might not be a severe concern for casual traders. However, if you get more into trading and want to do this, you’ll need to open an account elsewhere. Second, Robinhood hides some of its features, like more significant instant deposits and level II market data behind a Gold subscription. It’s only $5 a month, but some brokerages will give this information for free.
With Robinhood, you can get free stocks – or perhaps more accurately – you can get one share for free. They randomly award it, and there’s a 98% chance it will be between $2.50 and $10, 1% it’ll be between $10 and $50, and 1% that it will be between $50 and $250.
SoFi Investing
SoFi is another app that provides new registrants with the opportunity to get free stocks. As a company, SoFi is much more diverse than Robinhood, offering student loans, credit cards, banking, personal loans, insurance, and mortgages. They even have products for businesses.
The investing division provides a stock trading platform that has a few unique features. Prospective investors can get started for as little as $1. Investors can buy fractional shares, invest in curated ETFs (e.g., socially responsible ETFs), and use no-management-fee automated investing tools to build a portfolio.
In many respects, SoFi caters to the more “hands-off” or “buy and hold” investor by providing a straightforward, intuitive platform that can be as set-it-and-forget-it as you want. In this respect, they do not permit options trading, short selling, and some of the other more advanced trading choices. They do allow buying crypto, though.
SoFi lets you get free stocks. Technically, it is possible to get free shares, although most people will probably wind up with part of one. Upon signing up for an active investing account, you’ll play a mini-game where you’ll win between $5 and $1,000. You can then take that money and buy whatever number of shares that amounts to in whatever stock you want. For example, if you won $5 and you wanted Ford at $10 per share, you could redeem that $5 for 0.5 shares of Ford.
Webull – Get Free Stocks on One of the More Advanced Platforms
Webull is one of the more advanced platforms that still lets people get free stocks. It is a relatively new company. Established in 2017 by former Alibaba Group employee Wang Anquan, Webull has grown significantly to approximately 750,000 daily active users.
Webull has found success partly because it took a mobile-first approach but didn’t make the platform solely for beginners. In other words, the tools they have are mobile-centric, but that doesn’t mean they sacrificed functionality. This platform is one of the only ones in this class that permits options trading and short selling (with the right account levels). And, you can buy cryptocurrencies. Webull offers some excellent features, like Level II trading data, albeit for a small fee of $1.99 per month.
There’s only one downside to Webull, and that’s the inability to own fractional shares. You cannot own half a share of Amazon, for example. Depending on the dollar value you’re looking at trading and the stocks you want to buy, this could be a deal-breaker (since companies like Amazon and Tesla trade for hundreds or thousands of dollars per share). Therefore, before signing up for an account, please be realistic about what you want to trade. Balance that with how much you plan to have in the account to see if you need fractional shares or not. We have a comparison between Webull vs M1 Finance which may help you decide.
Webull does have one of the best get free stocks promotions, though. By opening an account, you have the opportunity to get two free stocks. The first stock, valued between $2.50 and $250, is for opening your account. The second stock, valued between $8 and $1,600, is only if you fund your account with $100 or more.
While the second stock does require you to fund your account with $100, this is a relatively low threshold that is entirely worth it to get the second free stock. You don’t have to trade that $100 – you merely have to transfer it. As long as you have an extra $100 lying around, putting it in your new account could win you up to $1,600!
Get Free Stocks: These Online Brokerages Have Fantastic Rewards
The world of online brokers is getting quite competitive. That’s a beautiful thing for consumers as it means that companies have to offer more significant incentives to encourage people to start trading on their platform. These three companies are offering the opportunity to get free stocks – something that would have been unheard of a few years ago. With more individual investors getting into the market, companies are finding innovative ways to reach prospective traders before someone else does.
If you want to start investing, now is the time to do so. You can get free stocks for signing up. As noted earlier, the importance of this is nearly impossible to overstress. What might be a few dollars now could be worth quite a bit more in the future.
The best part is: you don’t even need to spend any of your own money to become an investor! All you need to do is create an account and enjoy your free shares!
Located In Europe & Want Free Stocks?
Worry not we have a separate article dedicated to Free Stocks for those based in the UK and in Europe.