Investing used to be fun. There was that greedy voice in our heads saying: "Trust your gut! Take a risk!"
A fast-growing app called Stash is trying to make money by making investing enjoyable again. Its co-founders, Brandon Krieg and Ed Robinson, say they can do that without inspiring their customers, most of them millennials, to do anything too stupid.
Stash, which celebrated its first birthday on Friday, has signed up 215,000 users and is adding more than 10,000 a week, putting it on track to double its users in the next six months.
Many of these investors are beginners without much money to spare. While other investing options require thousands of dollars to start, you can open a Stash account with five bucks.
While most traditional brokers assume you know the difference between a stock and a bond, a large cap and a small cap, Stash assumes its new clients know just about nothing.
It offers only 36 investments, most of them exchange-traded funds, all renamed for beginning investors. Delicious Dividends is Stash’s more appetizing name for the Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF.
Roll With Buffett gives you a fractional share of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. That lets Stash's investors—average age 28, 80 percent under 34—invest alongside Warren Buffett, Berkshire's 86-year-old chief executive officer.