Auto-invest is setting up a regular investment in shares or exchange-traded funds. It’s a lot like contributing money to your KiwiSaver each pay - except you’re not limited to when you can withdraw it. In many cases, you’ll save on fees by auto-investing too. For Hatch kids’ accounts, auto-invest orders are fees-free!
How does auto-invest work?
With Hatch, you can auto-invest in up to five companies or exchange-traded funds at a time. You decide the:
USD amount
Percentage allocated to each investment
Frequency
If your goals change? You can edit or pause your auto-invest at any time.
Setting up an auto-investment is easy
Go to the main menu (the coloured box in the top right) then click Auto-Invest.
Follow the prompts to choose;
The USD amount you'd like to invest each time
The frequency (weekly, fortnightly, 4 weekly, monthly, quarterly)
The date of your next auto-investment
Decide what happens if your account’s USD cash balance is less than your auto invest amount on the day:
Use whatever balance you have: Your order will always be placed even if you don't have quite enough cash on the day (this can be useful for dealing with exchange rate fluctuations)
Skip the order: Your order will only be placed if you've got enough cash in your Hatch account for your full order
Choose one to five investments, and what percentage you want to allocate to each one. Hit save, and you're all set!
Once you've activated your auto-invest, your recurring market orders will be placed regularly until you decide to change or pause them.
It's up to you to keep enough USD in your account for any auto-invests you have scheduled, as you can use your account balance on other investments at any time.
To make the process even simpler, you could set up a recurring automatic payment from your bank to deposit into Hatch. To be on the safe side, you might like to do this a couple of working days before your scheduled auto-investment order date and to add a bit of extra “cushion” to your NZD deposits to cover fluctuations in the exchange rate to USD.
Note that if your scheduled order date falls on a non-trading day, like a weekend or USA public holiday, your order will be placed on the next trading day.
Example of using auto-invest on Hatch
If you want to invest $200 USD a month, you could set up an auto-invest to be placed on the 21st of every month allocating 60% to an ETF and 10% each to four of your favourite companies. Instead of our usual flat $3 fee per order, the fees for this would be 1% of each investment order (so totalling $2, included in your $200). Check out more examples on our auto-invest fees page.
If we haven't answered your question above, or there's anything else auto-invest related you're unsure about, you might like to check out our auto-invest FAQs.
Reasons why investors choose auto-invest
Dollar cost averaging
Rather than trying to ‘time the market’, dollar-cost averaging encourages you to invest a certain amount regularly, regardless of what the price is.
Read more: What is Dollar-cost averaging?
Set & forget
When building your portfolio, it can take a lot of time to keep researching different investments and checking the market at all hours. Auto-investing puts your money to work, whether or not you find the time to sign in to Hatch. Pick one or more investments you’re confident to keep investing in for the long-run and set up an automatic payment in internet banking for your investing to be fully automatic!
No more waiting for lump sums
Many investors set aside a portion of their income each payday to grow their portfolio. Rather than stockpiling that money before investing it all in one big sum to make the most of fees, our special auto-invest fees let you make regular investments of any amount with proportional fees.
Build better investing habits
Auto-investing makes it easy to stick to your financial plan. Not only does it remove the fear of making big lump sum investments, but it also can help remove emotion from your investment decision making. One way some investors successfully stick with regular investing is by automating as much as they can, so we’ve curated our auto-invest feature to help you pay yourself first. You might be surprised at how quickly regular small amounts can add up!