M1 Finance transformed Jonathan's ideas about how simple complexity could be and has quickly become his favorite investing platform, especially for taxable accounts. Brian Barnes investing story begins at the age of 10 when his parents exposed him to trading stock in a brokerage account with Ameritrade. He was captivated by the notion of investing and the intellectual puzzle of how a company was doing. His parents laid a general foundation of financial independence and security. Once basics were covered, they placed value on putting money someplace where it could accrue value, compound, and become ownership is something valuable. Getting started at the tail end of the Dot Com bust, it was a great time to be buying when prices were low and companies were valued cheaply. Brian says there is a big difference between traders and investors. Traders speculate on price and try to make money on short-term movements. Investors buy ownership in companies, asset classes, or industries to accrue value over long periods of time. When you aren't making frequent investment decisions, it becomes more about viewing your portfolio in totality and making a decision on what to do with the extra money you have leftover from your paycheck. In the trading world, you have to go in and make the same decisions to buy the same securities over and over again, but with M1, you can make the decision once and let the software automate the process. With day trading, you can't just be right once, you need to be right over and over and over again, constantly timing the market perfectly. It's difficult to predict costs even when commissions are free and it's tax-inefficient. With an investing mindset, you want to own over long periods to accrue value and generate cash flows. At the age of 25, Brian realized investing platforms hadn't changed in 15 years. He looked at consumer applications work that sought to make things simpler, more intuitive, and automated wondering why there hadn't been progress in the financial services world. He thought it would be nice if he could tell a software platform the portfolio he wanted to own, and anytime he had money, he could throw it into the platform and it just went to work. He wanted to deploy all of the money by purchasing fractional shares so there wasn't any cash drag. And finally, incredibly low fees with no commissions. As M1 has expanded, it's grown from his “wouldn't it be nice” idea to other areas like borrowing and spending, allowing users to have one financial institution instead of needing to use multiple apps. M1's philosophy is that a great product allows you to do complex things simply. What they allow customers to do is determine what share of their portfolio they want in any given investment and then the software handles the complex and mundane administrative work. It used to be that you had to buy lots of 100 shares. It was a big step forward to be able to purchase odd lots of shares. Being able to purchase fractional shares with M1 is transformational. They do this by purchasing in whole shares and adding the leftover fractions to their own inventory account. It makes it easier for the customer to deploy more money consistently and have a diversified portfolio. M1 is a commission-free platform. Traditional brokerages made 10-35% of their money from commissions. Through technology development, the cost to trade is only an electronic message. Though not free, on a per-transaction basis, it can be no-cost to the user. M1 can make money monetizing the assets held on their platform so by being efficient, they don't need to charge transaction fees, making it a win-win arrangement. M1 is not good for day traders. It's suited for systematic investing in the portfolio of your choosing. Their trade windows occur twice a day and aggregate all orders on behalf of their customers once in the morning and once in the afternoon. While you can invest money every day through M1, a good financial habit to establish is to in