HUGE $3,000 Welcome BONUS + New Silo Web Platform Review

Over the past few months, you may have noticed a bond platform that I have been promoting on the show, Silo. We've been calling them the Robin Hood of bond investing for their low fees and easy interface. They're fighting the giants and bringing bond investing to the masses. Basically, they could very well be doing for bond investing what the Robin Hood app did for stock investing. These guys have the next generation. Right. And Silo is bringing that same innovation to the bond space. And they've also been offering a crazy deal for my viewers. A 3% match on whatever funds you deposit on the platform up to a bonus of $3,000. We'll tell you more on that later. But the reason we're talking about this is that so far, Silo has only been accessible through their iOS app. That is, until today. Because they just unveiled their new web platform, accessible through any internet browser. So you can now buy and sell bonds from a desktop computer and lock in some crazy rates on your money. Up to 7.2% on US government bonds when accounting for the 3% bonus for my viewers. So stick around for an intro to interest rates, US government and corporate bonds, and a walkthrough of the new platform and more details on that offer for my viewers. And just for disclosure, Silo did sponsor this review. But I hope to give you a clear introduction to the product. You can then make up your own mind what you think about it. So you may have noticed your interest rate on your savings account going down in recent months. Here's an email from Amex Personal Savings from October saying that my rate has gone down to 4.1%. Then here's another email from them at the end of November saying my rate had now gone down to 3.9%. That is because the Fed is cutting interest rates. They originally raised rates to fight inflation, okay, to get money out of the economy. It's kind of like that Fed money printer meme in reverse. But now they are cutting interest rates to encourage people to spend their money in the economy and invest in stocks rather than putting it in a savings account. It's like the money printer has been switched on again. So far, they have cut what they call the prime rate twice in 2024, once by 50 basis points or half a percent and once by 25 basis points. The lower rate then trickles through to savings account interest rates, bond rates, mortgage rates and everything. But certain things move faster and others slower. So savings accounts get adjusted immediately, as you can see. But with bonds, which are the debt of companies or the US government, which you can buy, they may not drop as much straight away since there are other factors affecting a bond's price. In addition to that, bonds lock up your money for a period of time, so you are guaranteed that rate. Even if newer bonds are sold with lower rates, you are locked into the old higher interest rate until your bond matures. So if you buy a one year US Treasury bill right now with a 4.23% interest rate, you will keep that rate for a whole year, even if the Fed lowers rates again and newer T-bills are sold at lower rates. And if you do it through Silo as a new customer, you will get a 3% bonus on whatever cash you deposit up to $100,000 in deposits or a $3,000 bonus. So that effectively means you are getting 7.23% on that T-bill in your first year. You can get that deal by using my link below to sign up. But now let's look at Silo's new web platform and how to use it. So many brokerages still display bonds in these clunky tables, which really aren't very intuitive or clear. But with this new web platform and actually with their original app before it as well, Silo aims to provide you with an easy to use interface which demystifies bond investing, just like Robinhood massively simplified stock investing with their simple interface. Now, the first page is going to show you your portfolio. I'm using a demo account because this is only just launched. In the middle, we can see our overall value and the amount of interest it is bringing in daily, monthly and annually. Then on the right, we have the amount of cash available in our account that we can buy more bonds with. Below that, we have our holdings of both U.S. government and corporate bonds. Let's now click in and look at a U.S. government bond. On the individual bonds page, we can see the price, the bond rating, which in this case is the credit rating of the U.S. economy. And we then have the maturity date. Then below, we have the coupon rate, which is how much the bond pays annually in interest. But then this bond is selling above face value at over the $1,000 actual value of the bond, since it pays a higher interest rate than bonds that you can buy now. So we then have this figure, which takes that into account and shows you exactly how much you would earn per year from this bond. Let's now search for a bond that we want to buy. How about a corporate bond? Apple, for instance. So I search Apple in the search bar. It then gives us a load of different Apple corporate bonds to choose from. And the information is displayed really clearly. You have the yield, the rating, the price and the maturity date. If we click in, we can actually buy some of these bonds which are denominated in thousands. I'm going to buy three. And these are trading at a little below face value. So I'm getting a higher yield than the coupon rate. You can see here Silo's fee is just $1 per thousand. So $3 in total for this transaction. For contrast, the average markup on bond sales at brokerages is $15 per bond. We can also search for U.S. government securities. If you just type U.S., you can see different options pop up for bills, notes and bonds. These are different timeframes. Bills are the shortest up to one year until maturity. Notes are two to 10 years and bonds are 20 to 30 years. Then what if we want to search for bonds another way? Well, if we use the explore option, we can filter bonds by rating. So I'm going to select BBB, which is the rating above what is considered junk bonds. So that gives us the highest likelihood of a high yield whilst managing risk. Personally, I don't go below BBB. Check out this BBB Motorola bond, which has a yield of 6.53 percent. Now, you can also filter by yield. If you search like 15 percent, it's going to be junk. All right. That's kind of too good to be true. The company might be about to go out of business. But let's search between six and nine percent. We're going to be taking a little more risk, but hopefully it'll pay off. So I'm looking for BBBs in that percentage rating. And we have Dow Chemical. There's Motorola again. And we have Bayer, all yielding a bit over six percent. Combine that six percent yield with the three percent deposit bonus for my viewers. And you have nine percent in your first year. So that's a little demonstration of how you can search and buy bonds on Silo. Now let's talk about security. Silo gives you three layers of protection. First of all, assets are stored with Interactive Brokers, a debt-free firm with 45 years of Wall Street experience. Then they also provide $500,000 in SIPC insurance and $2.5 million in FDIC insurance. This security on assets backs up Silo's core mission of getting investors the best possible yield on their money, even as the Fed slashes rates. Since with bonds, you can lock that money away and keep earning that interest rate for years, while so-called high yield savings accounts drop to near zero. So they're trying to do for bonds what Robinhood has done for stocks. And I would say that the offering is pretty competitive, especially with the current promotion they're running for my viewers. Once again, get a three percent match on your deposits into a new Silo account up to a $3,000 bonus. Link for that deal is below. Please leave your comments below, guys. What do you think of Silo? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please subscribe to the channel if you're new and we'll see you in the next video. Bye-bye.