Best investment apps for beginners

Keen to invest your hard earned money? Great idea. Investing can be a real game changer for your financial future if done sensibly. Your money can seriously grow over time with the right long-term investment strategy.

The best way to invest for the long-term is to simply let the experts handle everything for you. They know what they’re doing and will grow your money over time using the right investment strategies.

Here's the best investment apps for beginners – which are investment platforms (a place to invest) managed by the experts. And, if you are keen to make your own investments, we’ll cover the best self-managed investment apps too.

Best investment apps for beginners

Best self-managed investment apps

Best investment app for pensions

Our criteria for the best beginner investment apps

To find the best investment apps for beginners, we looked at a range of criteria:

• Ease of use
• The app experience
• The support from experts
• Range of investments
• Fees
• Customer reviews

There's now a lot of good investment apps out there, but we’ve narrowed it down to the best – ones we use ourselves here at Nuts About Money. You can’t go wrong – as long as you use their experts to manage your money, or a sensible investment strategy for your own investments.

What’s an expert-managed investment app?

An expert-managed investment app is a place to invest your money. You’ll simply add your money, and use an app to manage your money, and track your investment portfolio (where your money is invested).

Behind the scenes, there’s experts managing your money and devising the right investment strategies to achieve your goals – whether that’s saving for retirement, saving for a big purchase, or anything else. They’ll also be constantly monitoring and adjusting the investments to make sure they’re on track.

Although of course, if you’re using an investment app to buy individual shares (own parts of companies), there’s no experts behind the scenes, but the investment app will buy, sell and hold the investments you want. More of those below.

Note: sometimes experts looking after your money is also called wealth management.

What’s a self-managed investment app?

These are sometimes called trading apps, or trading platforms. These investing apps are where instead of experts managing your money, you’ll make your own investment decisions (buy and sell investments). 

They’re more suited to experienced investors. However, if you’re looking to learn about trading and investing, they’re pretty great for beginners too, especially eToro¹ – where you can copy trades from advanced investors, and they have lots of educational resources. Plus it’s low cost. Here’s our eToro review to learn more about them.

Anyway, with a self-managed investment platform, you’ll pick from a huge range of investment options, such as individual stocks and shares, funds and more (we’ll cover types of investments below). It’s all up to you.

It’s best to use an investment strategy to decide which investments to make, and build a diversified portfolio – that’s where you have a range of different investments to reduce your overall risk and grow your money over time. Here’s where to learn more about investing for beginners.

What’s investing?

Not quite sure what investing is? To put simply, investing is using your money to (hopefully) make more money – growing your money over time.

There’s lots of different ways to invest (we’ll list the main types below), but with an expert-managed account you don’t need to worry too much about where exactly your money is invested, the experts will handle everything, you simply pick from a small range of investment options that suit you. For instance, socially responsible investing (e.g. no fossil fuel companies).

Let’s dive into that a bit more. Expert-managed investment apps offer a range of simple investment options that suit different types of people. They’re often categorised into risk levels (don’t let the word risk put you off), from low risk to higher risk. 

With higher risk, the aim is to grow your money as much as possible (sensibly), and there’s normally more ups-and-downs along the way – but over the long-term this should make you more money. And with lower risk options, there’s less ups-and-downs, but your money is likely to grow slower.

Types of investments

There’s quite a few different types of things you can invest in, all suited to different types of investment strategies. Here’s the main types:

Stocks and shares (equities)

These are where you own part of a company (a business) – you own a ‘share’ of the company. These can go up and down in value, normally depending on how well the company performs. They can also pay out their profits to shareholders, which is called dividends.

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs)

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs), are groups of investments (such as stocks and shares) all pooled together into a single investment – making it much easier to buy and sell (you don't have to buy them individually). For instance, a collection of green energy companies, or electric vehicle companies.

These groups of investments are called investment funds, or mutual funds, and are traded on stock exchanges (a place to buy and sell investments), and therefore called exchange-traded funds. And they’re super popular!

Bonds

These are where governments and large corporations essentially borrow money from you in return for interest. These are often thought of as lower risk investments.

Property

This is often commercial property, such as shops and offices, that pay rent – which provides an income to the investors.

Investing within a Stocks and Shares ISA

With a lot of investment apps, you’ll have the option to invest in a Stocks and Shares ISA. This is an investment account where everything you make is completely tax-free, forever!

You won’t have to worry about Capital Gains Tax, Income Tax or Dividend Tax. They’re all taxes that you might have to pay if you invested outside of an ISA.

If you did have to pay Capital Gains Tax, you’d pay it on any profit you make over £3,000 (when you sell your investments). And you’d pay 18% of your profits if you were a basic rate taxpayer (earning less than £50,270 per year from your salary), and 24% if you were a higher rate taxpayer (earning more than £50,270 per year).

You can save or invest up to £20,000 per tax year (April 6th to April 5th the following year), called your ISA allowance.

Nuts About Money tip: See how much you could save with our Stocks and Shares ISA calculator and compare all the top Stocks and Shares ISAs.

Investing within a General Investment Account (GIA)

If you have used up your ISA allowance or prefer not to open an ISA, you can invest within a General Investment Account (GIA).

There's no limit to the amount you can add to a GIA but they don’t have any tax-free benefits.

Investing within a personal pension

This is one of your best options to save for your retirement – a personal pension.

When you save and invest with a personal pension, you’ll get a massive 25% bonus on everything you pay in. Yep, we’re not joking! This is from the government and paid automatically straight into your pension pot.

And if you’re a higher rate taxpayer (40%), or an additional rate taxpayer (45%), you can claim some of this back too (on your Self Assessment tax return).

A personal pension is a type of private pension, that’s a pension in your name, and you decide how much you pay in, and when to withdraw it (as long as you’re over 55). The other type of private pension is a workplace pension, which you’ll likely have if you’re employed, and it’s all set up by your employer.

There’s also the State Pension, which is the government pension – and you’ll get this at the State Pension age (currently 66), if you’ve paid enough National Insurance contributions in your working career (at least 10 years, but 35 years to get the full amount).

Saving for retirement with a personal pension is a great way to boost your retirement income, it’s unlikely the State Pension, even together with a workplace pension is going to build a big enough pension pot to have a comfortable retirement.

If you want to learn more, here’s how much you’ll need in your pension pot to retire.

You’ll be able to save up to £60,000 per tax year, or as much as your income (e.g. your salary), whichever is lower. And, you can have as many personal pensions as you like.

When you do start withdrawing your pension, the first 25% will be completely tax-free, and you can take this as a tax-free lump sum if you like. How much tax you’ll pay on the remaining 75% depends on your income at the time.

To find out how much you'll receive in retirement use our pension calculator.

Saving for your kids (Junior ISA)

You can also save for your kids’ future (if you have them), with a Junior ISA. This is where you open an investing account in your kids name, and save completely tax-free. They’ll be able to access the money when they turn 18.

You can save up to £9,000 per year, and this is completely separate from your own £20,000 ISA allowance.

Which investment app is the best for low balances?

If you’re just starting investing and haven’t got any savings yet, don’t worry. You can start from just £1 with Lightyear¹. It’s a great easy to use investment app overall.

With the other investing apps, you’ll usually need a minimum investment of around £500. Unless you’re using an investing app specific for pensions, such as PensionBee¹ – where you can get started with as little as you like.

Investing app fees

You might be thinking investment apps must be really expensive if they’re handling everything for you and some even provide investment advice. Well actually no! They’re much cheaper than financial advisors (human advisors who look after your money).

Expert managed fees

For expert-managed investment apps, you’ll pay a simple annual management fee, which is a percentage of your total investment, and this can range from around 0.25% to 1%.

You’ll then pay fees on the investments themselves (the investment funds), and this can range from 0.05% to 0.4%+. And sometimes there are small trading fees involved when the experts buy and sell investments.

All of these fees together is what you’ll pay, and our suggestions above are very good value and have low fees overall. Expect to pay around 1% per year, and this can sometimes reduce when you save more.

Self-managed fees

Overall, self-managed investment platforms are generally cheaper than expert-managed apps, as you’re not getting expert advice or experts handling your investments. However that doesn’t mean expert-managed apps are not great value.

With some self-managed platforms, you’ll pay an annual management fee for the platform to hold your investments, which can be from 0.25% to 0.45% (normally only if you hold mutual funds), and you pay pay a trading fee, or share dealing fee, to buy and sell investments This can range from no fee (commission-free) to as much as £11.95 per trade.

The top investment apps we’ve listed above are all low cost, in fact, eToro¹ is completely commission-free and has no account fees at all. You’ll often only pay a fee to convert your money to another currency when buying investments not in the UK (called a currency-conversion fee).

Are investment apps safe?

Yep! All investment apps in the UK have to be registered and approved by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). They’re the guys who make sure your money and investments are safe.

You can check if an investment app has been authorised by the FCA by checking the FCA register. All the ones we’ve listed above are FCA authorised.

It also means your money is protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), which gives you protection of up to £85,000 should anything happen to the investment app, such as going out of business (unlikely).

However, your money and investments are actually held with a large bank, rather than with the investment app, and all in your name, and they can only be returned to you.

Let’s recap

And that’s all there is to investment apps for beginners – does it all make a bit more sense now? We hope you’re convinced that investing for your future in a safe and sensible way can really benefit your financial future.

We recommend using an expert-managed investment app if you’re just getting started. Why not just let the experts grow your money over time? It’s much easier.

That’s it! All the best investing.