How to Buy Stock on Public.com

Public is a novice-friendly stock trading platform that makes investing in the stock market easy and accessible for everyone. Making your first investment on the platform is very easy and only takes a minute. Here’s how it works.

When you open the Public app, it takes you to your Home screen. If you navigate to the Search page, you can find any particular stock you’re thinking of investing in. Once you’ve located the stock you want to purchase, you’ll see the stock’s price chart for the day and a blue button that says Invest in the bottom right.

Tap Invest to get to a popup order window that will tell you your buying power (how much money you have available to invest), a selection of dollar amounts, and the order type (Market Buy).

You can enter a custom dollar amount if the prepopulated amounts don’t work for you. If you are buying a “slice” of stock, or a fractional share, you need to keep your order type as Market Buy. Enter your desired dollar amount and tap Next.

The confirmation screen will pop up with your order details. You can see what you are investing in, how much you are paying, and how many shares you are getting. Simply hit Submit and you’ve made an investment on Public!

After you have submitted your order, you will see a screen that shows what you just purchased and gives you the option of leaving a tip. In order for Public to make money and offer commission free trading without using Payment for Order Flow (PFOF), they accept tips to cover the cost of executing trades. Tipping is not required. Simply tap Continue without tip if you do not want to leave a tip.

Next, you are automatically routed to Public’s social media feed and prompted to create a post about the order you just placed. If you want to share this information with your followers on Public, type what you want to say and tap Post. If you don’t want to broadcast your trades, tap PUBLIC and your post will change to private so no one else can see it.

Tap Done, and now you can go back to your home screen and you’ll see your new investment there as well as a note about how your investment is performing.