Social media changed everything, from news consumption to shopping. Now, Dubble Thinks it can do the same for investing via an influencer-driven marketplace where users can follow the transactions of top investors with a few taps. Think of it as Tiktok met Wall Street.
Founded by the 23-year-old Steven Wang-A Drop-Out by Harvard who started investing in the second grade with the blessing of his parents-dub gambling that the future of investing is not about choosing shares but choosing people. With the app, users can follow the strategies of traders, hedge funds and even those simulating controversial politicians. Instead of making individual trade decisions, DUB users can copy full portfolios.
The concept has reached an agreement. DUB has already surpassed and raised 800,000 downloads $ 17 million In seed financing – apparently in the making with a new round. It is less clear whether DUB can prevent the pitfalls of earlier fintech startups.
Inspired by Gamestop
Retail investment has evolved dramatically over the past two decades. The days of $ 7 trade committees and awkward brokerage interfaces were blown apart about a decade ago by mobile-first platforms such as Robinhood those people invited to act for free. At the same time, social media reform how people, and in particular members of Gen Z, make financial decisions.
As a Harvard student during the Pandemie-IMand who exchanged from his dormitory “because you couldn’t really do anything at school”-Wang believe that these two trends, investment investment and influencer-driven decision-making, on a bone course. Between the Gamestop -Saga, Elon Musk’s ability to “move the Dogecoin and Bitcoin markets with every tweet” and the willingness of people to “really follow ideas and individuals to a whole new level”, Wang decided in 2021 to stop and build dub.
At the moment the average user of the platform is between 30 and 35, says Wang, although DUB -based DUB clearly finds his way for an even younger audience. In recent weeks, the 15-year-old from this editor has asked more than once about “Investing such as Nancy Pelosi” after marinating in DUB ads on Instagram.
Pelosi does not act personally on DUB; It is just a trader on the platform who reflects her revealed movements. Yet the idea is on fire. “Nancy Pelosi has risen at Dub with real capital at 123%,” says Wang, “and we have earned our customers millions of dollars since that portfolio was launched on the platform.”
Dub is not free. Wang was determined to generate income from the start, and DUB does that today via a $ 10 subscription model. Wang also says that some “top” portfolios on the platform control costs and DUB takes a reduction in those costs of 25%.
In the meantime, DUB has been partially scaled by organic growth. “Makers who are good traders in the app are encouraged to bring their audience,” says Wang, whose parents from China emigrated and who grew up in Detroit.
DUB also invests aggressively in advertisements and leans heavily in Meta advertisements in particular to acquire users, including on Instagram. “We were really lucky where I think the wider American population really believes that there are other people who have a lead on them when it comes to the investing world,” says Wang.
Vecht Words
The question now is whether DUB will follow a similar path as other fast-growing fintech startups, many of which are in the sights of regulators. Robinhood disrupted financing by freeing trade, but it was also confronted Digital confetti Every time they had done a profession.
Dub says it would like to avoid the same mistakes. The company has worked with Finra for more than two years and the SEC before it was launched to ensure that the model met the financial regulations. “We not only navigated regulation at DUB – we embraced it““Wang says. (Just like Robinhood, DUB is a fully licensed broker dealer.)
A great distinction, says Wang, is that DUB has been designed to teach users, not only encourage blind speculation. The platform shows risk scores, risk-corrected returns and portfolio statistics to help investors make informed decisions, he says.
He suggests that it is safer for investors than Robinhood. Wang says: “I have a lot of respect for what [CEO] Lobby [Tenev] has done to make the trade for free. But at the end of the day it is super easy to exchange without expert guidance, without training, actually just gambling for the wider population. ”
To underline his point, Wang points to the decision of Robinhood – together with Coinbase and other fairs – to make the Meme -Munt Trump available to customers prior to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. While it initially rose into price, the price has fallen since then. Wang says: “I think that the incentives are fundamentally just wrong between these large platforms that are now public companies that have to earn money” and that “in general” their customers “probably have lost money”.
(Worth mentioning: in a separate, recent conversation with Robinhood’s Teev about DUB, Teev suggested that a copy trade could be of more interest for regulators, and that DUB cannot yet be under the “magnifying glass” because of the relatively smaller size .)
Anyway, not everyone is sold on Dub’s vision. The biggest knock against Such platformsSays critics, is that the picking of shares that passively invest in the long term, with studies that show that the most actively managed funds do not beat the S&P 500.
It is a criticism that Wang is known – and on which he quickly pushes back. First, he argues that many such studies have been ‘picked’. (“I bet that many of them are sponsored by the passive investment index companies,” he says.)
Furthermore, Wang says, there is a reason that actively managed hedge funds such as Citadel bloom. “If you look at what the ultra rich can do, they give their money to Ken Griffin of Citadel, [because] They consistently set non-correlated returns on year after year, “he says.
If someone looks more broad “looks at the growth of the space of the hedge fund and the space for asset management,” Wang continues, “there is a reason why it is growing. It is because they make money for their customers.”