I think this is a good company, myself has been using their service for more than 6 months now. Their app development is great in terms of design, update as well as support. Over the past few months, they have been trying a lot of different methods to get new member (referral reward).
The concept of the business is pretty straight forward, you can make micro investment through different way(I will list down the procedures below:
1) Link your bank account to the app and enter your TFN for tax declaration.
2) you can choose to invest through daily, weekly or monthly deposit into your acorn account, otherwise you can setup automatic deposit whenever you spend on something (let's say you buy a coffee for $4.95, and you can instruct the app the deposit 5cents into the account for you everytime you buy a coffee).
3) After fund is added, you can choose an investment style (there are 5 types, range from conservative to aggressive).
4) watch the money grows or you can withdraw funds from the account anytime you want (3 business days processing time).
From investment point of view, this service won't make you a millionaire, but you will get a good money saving habit out of it. In my own observation, more than 6 months into the app, the investment it makes just gonna yield between 4-4.5% (fee-adjusted, this is on aggressive investment option), and it depends on how the overall market performs on that particular day too, once I got up to around 8%. But when Brexit came, it dropped to around 4%. Overall, it is still a better investment than putting the money in the bank at current stage.
There are good and bad about this ipo, the good is they will use most of the money that raised to reinvest and grow the business. The bad is the ipo price of $1.00(overpriced) and there are couple of alternatives already existed in US market (it's only matter of time, when they will enter AU market. The other thing people who uses this service might need to consider the transparency of their investment portfolio.
Feel free to ask any question.
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