Dan Malone

You know, it could be whatever it might be, 10, 15, 20 euro a trade.

Exactly.

And like, you know, with a lot of these new investing apps, some of them truly have no fees with the exception of maybe foreign currency translation fees.

And we explain more about what that is later on.

But I think a lot of the big marketing push from these financial technology companies is that they're zero commission.

So when you invest using them, a lot of the times you're not paying any fees to actually invest.

And the reason why that's so important is because all the data, historical data over the last, you know, 5,200 years has showed us that

You need to be minimizing your costs when you're investing, because if your costs are high, that's going to eat into your investment returns over time.

So the name of the game is reducing costs insofar as possible.

So that's one of the principal, principal benefits of using these apps.

Yeah, so I think there's a couple of things to look at.

You're right to be skeptical in the sense that when something is free, you're kind of wondering to yourself, what's the catch?

When you download an investing platform, what you're doing is you're using a platform to access different stock exchanges to be able to buy and sell shares of different companies at a basic level.

In practice, when you actually invest and you buy shares in the stock market, you're nearly always interacting with what's called a market maker.

And a market maker is effectively just a very large financial institution who operates on both sides of a trade.

So if you want to buy Microsoft stock, they will sell you the Microsoft stock.

And if you want to sell Microsoft stock, they'll buy it for you.

So they're on both sides of the trade.

So investing platforms historically made money by directing all of their customers' orders to one specific market maker.

And the benefit of that is the market maker is able to make a very, very minuscule profit on every trade.