Autopilot: Automated Investing

Tried to use the Pelosi Tracker with my Schwab brokerage. Upon receiving my deposit of $2000, Autopilot placed $600 of the money into stocks, while the other $1400 remained as cash while trades were “pending”. The trades were pending for a few days before I messaged their customer support team to see what was holding everything up. They told me that they were having issues with Schwab accounts and that I should withdraw the money back into my Schwab account. I did, losing $10 in the process (thank you so much for that) and waited a few days for the money to show up in my Schwab account before attempting to deposit money into a different tracker. Now Autopilot is showing that I have no purchasing power in my Schwab account, which is just wrong because the money is in there. I’m going to see if I can transfer the funds from Schwab to a Robinhood account and then back into Autopilot and see if I have better luck there, but for now this app simply does not work for me, which absolutely deserves a 1-star rating. The fact that there are still so many issues with Schwab accounts is inexcusable. Also, the fact that the only resolution the support team provided me was to withdraw and take a loss is a pathetic effort on their part. *UPDATE* I was able to integrate Autopilot with my Robinhood account seamlessly. It seems that I will have to manually approve trades however, which means my app experience won’t be as hands off as I wanted it to. Either way, the app is now working as intended, which merits a bump to 3 stars. Assuming I don’t have any problems with brokerage disconnections or trading, once I start seeing good returns I will bump it up to a 4 or 5 stars.

First of all, I LOVE this app. In a year, my investment portfolio grew 25% (investing is risky and they are not FDIC-insured, my results are personal and should not be used as a guarantee to yourself), and I used it to pay down some debt. If you’re looking for a way to aggressively grow your money, this is the way to do it. That being said, there’s two things that impact the app’s functionality for me. One, all my brokerage accounts (except for an eff-around account I have with Robinhood) are with Fidelity and Fidelity does not have the most app-friendly API, likely for security reasons. That makes buying new stock difficult. Fidelity also disconnects regularly. Two, if you want to auto-buy new stock picks, you have to subscribe to the provider, and that’s rather expensive, although some are slightly cheaper than others. It’s worth it if you can use dividends to pay for the subscription or if you have the savings to absorb the cost but it can be challenging if you’re a new investor. All the same, I love the app, I’d highly recommend it, and I don’t let those things dissuade me from using it or recommending it to others.

I signed up for the automatic download a few months in advance due to enjoying their Twitter page and thinking “Wow: that’s actually a cool idea!” I was really excited when the app first downloaded. Went in, set up my account…BAM: “You need at least $500 in your account to use”. Oh noes! While my account has several thousands in it, it only had like $60 in buying power. So over a little bit of time, I traded off some losing stocks until my buying power was around $600. Went back to the account, set up my pilot, it went to work…BAM: subscription fee to continue use. !!! “…I can’t really afford that right now…”. I’m not very wealthy at all. My stock portfolio is from YEARS of adding money and making little trades here and there. My monthly income is tight (especially in this economy). While I figured there would probably be a fee, I thought that 1) it would be disclosed much sooner than it was and 2) it would be more in line with the value of the stock trades. For someone with a lower amount in their account, I would have figured it would have been either a lower cost (because the algorithm probably won’t make many trades with smaller accounts) or even some sort of merit system (like billed a certain percentage based on gains). While I think the app is nice and I had no issues with the use, I’m just let down that I won’t be able to use it to its full advantage until I basically find a better paying job.