2023 Ally Invest Review Pros, Cons & More

Ally Invest has proven to be a useful tool for all types of advisors, whether you want to be hands-on with your investments or not. But as helpful and convenient as a robo-advisor like Ally Invest can be, working entirely online isn’t always the right move for every investor. With Ally Invest, you’ll have to be comfortable not having immediate access to your own personal advisor.

Meanwhile, commissions on bond trades are $1 per bond, with a $10 minimum per trade. In addition to not charging a base commission for options trades, Ally Invest’s per-contract fee comes in lower than many other brokers at $0.50 per contract. Mutual funds include money from multiple investors to purchase a group of securities. These investments are also diversified across a number of assets and often lower risk than other investments. With Ally’s Self-Directed Trading, you’ll have access to $0 trading commissions, tools to help you research investments, access to ETFs from Vanguard, GlobalX, and iShares too.

Ally Invest charges $50 for a full or partial transfer of your securities out of your account (called an ACAT transfer). Often brokers charge a reduced fee for a partial transfer, but in general, $50 isn’t as high as some other brokerages. Like many online brokerages these days, Ally Invest has no account minimum, which is a great perk for someone who doesn’t have much to invest in the beginning. Some brokerages have account minimums between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars.

What Is Ally Invest and How Does it Work?

There are also more conventional means, such as email, though customers don’t have the option of going to a physical branch for assistance. But this latter point probably shouldn’t be a deal-breaker for most investors. Ally Invest Robo Portfolios is another option for those looking to take an automated approach to investing. For just a $100 minimum investment, Robo Portfolios will invest based on your goals and automatically rebalance your portfolio daily. Ally charges $0 for stock and ETF trades, putting it in line with other major online brokers.

Ally Invest charges $25 for IRA account closures, $75 for full account outgoing transfers, and $50 for partial account outgoing transfers. With a socially responsible portfolio, you can ensure that your money is invested in companies with high ethical and environmental standards. There was plenty of helpful content on these pages, such as how to start investing in three simple steps and how to become a better investor, but the information was not organized.

Why Ally Invest Over Others?

When you choose to trade and invest online yourself, you will see a higher price of $6.95. There is an opportunity to qualify for $0 trades, though, with preferred rewards. If you choose to go with Merrill Edge Guided Investing, you will also see a higher annual fee and minimum balance requirement of 0.45% and $5,000 respectively. This option allows you to invest online and benefit from professional advice and management. Ally Invest is a comprehensive broker offering easy access to domestic markets. Combining a wide range of charting tools with an easy-to-master platform, Ally is a solid choice for both new and experienced investors.

The brokerage remains a solid choice for most investors, however, regardless of skill level. Ally Invest has self-directed trading accounts (taxable brokerage, IRA) as well as “Robo Portfolios,” which is their term for their robo-advisory-like automated investing services. Ally Invest has zeroed out transaction fees on mutual funds, which makes it an easy choice for fund investors. Its universal accounts experience and easy-to-use website offer a convenient, attractively priced solution. As at many other robo-advisors, Ally Invest Robo Portfolios’ investment portfolios are made up of exchange-traded funds.

Retirement accounts

This cash allocation acts as a buffer against the ups and downs of the market and cannot be accessed like money in a savings account. When it comes to bond investments, you’ll need a minimum of $10, and you’ll https://trading-market.org/ally-invest-review-for-2021/ pay $1 per bond. Ally Invest offers more than 12,000 mutual funds, which cost $9.95 per trade. Ally’s self-directed brokerage accounts also offer commission-free trading on stocks, ETFs, and options.

Ally says each of the advisors it selects have, at minimum, fives years of experience, and some even hold the CFP and chartered financial consultant (ChFC) designations. If you’d rather practice passive investing, Ally Invest’s automated portfolios can do all the work for you. Plus, Ally Invest sets aside 30% of your portfolio as cash to protect your investments against market volatility.

Luckily, Ally Invest offers products for you no matter how experienced you are with investing or not. The self-directed trading and Cash-Enhanced Managed Portfolios accounts will appeal to hands-on investors and investors who would prefer to be less involved in their investments, respectively. Ally’s tools look through thousands of ETFs and its website provides information on ETFs including the risks they can pose.

Is Ally Invest right for you?

Manage your account, access your portfolio, and make trades seamlessly across multiple devices – on a desktop or with mobile and tablet apps for iPhone and Android. Like almost all other robos, Ally Invest Robo Portfolios builds portfolios from low-cost, well-diversified Vanguard or iShares ETFs. While Ally has joined most of the industry in dropping commissions for online stock trades to $0, it still charges a commission on lower-priced stocks. For customers buying large blocks of sub-$2 stocks, this broker can get very expensive. That depends on what kind of account you’re interested in and which features matter most to you.

• Webull offers a lot that investors will like such as commission-free trading, fractional shares and a slick mobile app that allows you to trade on the go or keep tabs on your favorite stocks.
• Ally Invest Robo Portfolios can support taxable brokerage accounts (individual, joint and custodial) along with various IRAs (traditional, rollover and Roth).
• You’ll also get access to quality research and its mobile app, but mutual fund investors may be disappointed by the small number of no-transaction fee funds available.
• Ally Invest offers a myriad of investing options, from more active trading to handing your cash off to their robo-advisor.

Ally’s leverages rates are a bit lower than some competitors like Fidelity — you’ll pay between 8.75% and 4.25% depending on how much you’re borrowing. However, Ally’s margin rates are higher on average than discount brokers like Robinhood or Interactive Brokers. They offer fee-free investing for self-directed traders, plus they also have no fees for their managed portfolios.

The best way to use this is as a snapshot into your account to see how your portfolio is performing. That way, in the event that all your other investments go south, you at least have that 30% buffer that has been growing over time. Other than the $100 minimum to invest, I didn’t have to pay anything to start investing.

Clients can instantly transfer cash through One Ally Transfer to Ally Bank to access a savings account with a competitive APY. In addition to these nine strategies, other screens can be used, such as top performers, top-rated, top dividends, value stocks, and more. The strategies can also be backtested, which is done by taking the top ten stocks in the scan results and then comparing them to the S&P, DJIA, or NASDAQ to provide a representative return for that search. Again, the trader still needs to make their own decisions on individual securities to trade. Further, the comparison symbol function only allows for a symbol to be added, eliminating the primary website’s drop-down options. Using a combination of Ally Invest Live and the primary website can work for chart traders, but it is more of a headache than it needs to be.

Ally Invest’s traditional brokerage accounts can be held by a single individual, jointly by a legal couple, or in a custodial arrangement between a parent or guardian and a minor child (custodial account). Unlike Ally’s IRAs, traditional brokerage accounts are not tax-advantaged. If you prefer individual stocks and ETFs for your portfolio, investment research tools like Ziggma can help you find the best stocks for your portfolio. Our Ziggma review tests the various features of this stock analysis tool so you can decide if it deserves a spot in your investment toolkit. Thankfully, WiserAdvisor can match you with professional advisors in their network that they have vetted in advance.

The platform offers good diversification with its low-cost ETF choices. Dedicated phone customer service representatives available 24/7 are a plus. Many other robo-advisors only offer business hours phone customer service options while some lack a phone option altogether.

You can still get publicly available news, conference calls, etc. – but anything extra is unavailable. Ally Invest has good options forecasting and pricing tools because TradeKing catered to options traders (more volume meant more commissions, a smart business strategy!). Options trading can be tricky to understand, and they are really only used by advanced investors. In very simple terms, an option gives you (the buyer) the power to buy stocks (and other investments) at a fixed price for a fixed amount of time, no matter how the price fluctuates. I decided to give Ally’s managed portfolios a try, rather than the self-directed investing.