Magnifi Review – Is This AI Brokerage Worth Using?

Magnifi is one of the first brokerage platforms to integrate an AI chatbot to help you invest. You can ask Magnifi’s AI to help you find stocks, build a portfolio, plan for retirement, and more.

While the AI can be helpful in some situations, it’s not yet a replacement for a human advisor. In our Magnifi review, we’ll explain how this AI investing platform works and highlight its benefits and shortcomings.

Magnifi Pricing Options

Magnifi costs $14 per month or $132 per year. Stock and ETF trades in your Magnifi account are completely commission-free. You can try out Magnifi for free for 7 days.

Brokerage Features

Before we dive into Magnifi’s AI assistant, it’s worth knowing what brokerage features this platform offers.

Magnifi enables you to buy and sell fractional shares of stocks and ETFs commission-free. The minimum investment is just $5. Magnifi only offers traditional brokerage accounts, not IRAs or other account types.

The platform has a unique order interface that looks more like an ecommerce checkout page than a traditional brokerage order form. When buying or selling a stock, you add it to a buy or sell “cart,” then select the amount and click a checkout button. 

The nice thing about this approach is that you can add multiple stocks to your cart at once and easily modify the amount of each to buy before executing purchases at once. However, you lose the ability to place limit orders or use risk management tools like stop losses or take-profit orders. You also can’t view important information like spreads or trading volume that indicate how liquid a stock is. 

If you have accounts at other brokerages, you can link them to Magnifi using Plaid. Most major brokerages are supported, including Fidelity, Robinhood, Vanguard, and Charles Schwab. Once you link accounts, you can view all of your investments in Magnifi’s dashboard.

Magnifi AI

Magnifi’s AI assistant is what makes this platform unique. You can ask it a wide variety of investment and market-related questions including things like:

• What is the latest market news?
• How did different sectors perform?
• What can I invest in for a retirement portfolio?
• How are my investments performing compared to the market?
• What stocks have earnings coming up tomorrow?

Magnifi’s AI does a nice job of providing succinct answers to these questions, and it includes charts and graphs to illustrate things like performance.

It also has some neat stock analysis features. For example, you can ask it to compare the performance or volatility of several stocks. You can also ask the AI how rising interest rates or inflation might impact your portfolio.

You can even use the AI to help you build a portfolio. For example, you can ask it to build a portfolio of stocks in a certain industry or that fit a specific theme, like green energy or AI (although it produced some interesting results—the majority of the green energy portfolio contained Exxon Mobil stock). You can also ask it to build a portfolio with dividend stocks with yield greater than 5% and a market cap over $10 billion.

While some of the chatbot’s capabilities were impressive, it also had a lot of shortcomings. It seems to perform very well when using the suggested prompts, but has a lot of trouble if you ask it to build on its findings or do something more involved.

For example, you can ask the AI to “compare the returns of AMZN, NVDA, and AAPL stocks”, and it will produce a helpful graph. However, if you ask it to “Add META to the analysis,” it will return an error. You must repeat the original prompt with META added into the list.

The chatbot also struggled with prompts like:

• Show me the biggest gainers in the stock market today
• What are the best high-risk, high-reward stocks?
• What are some international stocks with a 5% or higher dividend yield?

In addition, unlike ChatGPT, Magnifi’s AI won’t generate answers to open-ended questions using information from news articles or web pages. For example, you can’t ask what analysts think about a specific stock and get answers based on analysis articles on sites like Seeking Alpha or Motley Fool.

Is Magnifi Worth It?

Magnifi is among the first investment platforms—and, to our knowledge, the first brokerage platform—to integrate new AI-powered chatbot technology. The platform feels as if Robinhood merged with ChatGPT, and a lot of Magnifi’s features have more in common with ChatGPT than with traditional stock analysis tools.

While Magnifi is neat, it’s hard to find a lot of value in the platform. Commission-free stock and ETF trades are nice, but you can get that from many major brokerages without paying for a subscription.

You could also replicate Magnifi’s chatbot features at no cost using ChatGPT. In fact, if you do use ChatGPT instead, you’ll be able to ask much more open-ended questions and pull in more information from current stock analysis articles. ChatGPT is prone to hallucinations that can make it difficult to use as an investing tool, but our testing found that Magnifi AI also delivers strange answers to some prompts.
Magnifi may be worth it for newer investors who want a helping hand with putting together a portfolio or who want help analyzing portfolios across multiple brokerage accounts. However, Magnifi’s AI still needs to make a lot of progress before you can fully rely on its answers. At this point, it’s definitely not a replacement for traditional investment learning resources or stock picking services.