Signing Up On Motif Investing
The Motif website is uncluttered and straightforward. It’s clear that you’re not promised all of the functionality and tools of some other long-established online broker sites and simplicity and ease of use appear to be their benchmark. Prior to signing up, you can access their How It Works section that gives you the basics; after you’ve signed up, you get access to much more complete FAQs and to their support staff who post timely answers to both generic and specific questions from clients.
After going through the sign-up process and the funding of my new account, I reviewed all the existing 60 or so motifs, from ‘Cash Flow Kings’ to ‘Senior Care’ to ‘Dogs of the Dow.’ They have some interesting concepts but I knew I wanted to really get under the hood and create my own little fund.
My First Investing
Motif
For starters, I selected their ‘Black Gold’ motif, consisting of 25 companies including integrated oil and gas, drilling and services and equipment companies, with Exxon having the heaviest weighting at 13.7%. I happen to like investments in hard assets and the price of oil is down recently which means the price of many of these stocks are off their highs. My kind of long-term opportunity.
I easily deleted 23 of the companies in the existing motif with just a couple of clicks, keeping Exxon (XOM) and Chevron (CVX) and I added 8 stocks of my own choosing, all in the energy or energy infrastructure industries. Then, I used their handy-dandy sliding scale to adjust the weighting of each of the stocks in my little fund to exactly 10.0%. Not to worry, you don’t have to do any heavy calculations – their system doesn’t let you wind up with 105%.
Trust me. If I can do this, anybody can do this. It’s that easy.
I saved my customized motif – now called myBlackGold – punched in a $5,000 buy and watched the countdown as my order was filled. It took 8 seconds. And I wound up owning 10 stocks, each with a total investment within pennies of $500 and each in some share amount with a fraction. For example, I bought 6.13 shares of Exxon (XOM) at $81.44 each for a total of $499.23.
After The Sale
Later that day, I made another purchase of myBlackGold customized motif, just to see if I’d missed anything or if anything different happened on additional investments. It appears I hadn’t missed anything. The second buy happened just like the initial purchase and the additional shares appeared in my account.
The detail of each order and transaction was complete and what you would expect to see – number of shares, fill price, order time, fill time, total dollar buy of each, etc.
All in all, Motif Investing delivered what they said they would and at the cost they said they would. The cost, in this case, was zero because they are offering no-cost trades for the month of June.
