Social media has changed everything from news consumption to purchases. NOW, Nickname Think that it can do the same to invest via a market focused on influencers where users can follow the transactions of better investors with a few taps. Think about it like Tiktok meets Wall Street.
Founded by Steven Wang, 23 years old – a dropout from Harvard who started investing in the second year with the blessing of his parents – Dub bets that the future of investment does not concern the selection of actions but the picking of people. The application allows users to follow traders’ strategies, hedge funds and even those who imitate high -level politicians. Instead of making individual commercial decisions, DUB users can copy entire portfolios.
The concept hit a sensitive string. Dub has already exceeded 800,000 downloads and reports $ 17 million In seed financing – with a new tour apparently underway. Less clear is whether DUB can avoid the traps of previous finchal startups.
Inspired by GameStop
Retail investment has evolved considerably over the past two decades. The days of the $ 7 negotiation commissions and clumsy brokerage interfaces were exploded approximately ten years ago by mobile platforms like Robinhood who invited people to negotiate for free. At the same time, social media resumes the way people, and in particular members of generation Z, make financial decisions.
As a student at Harvard during the pandemic – the one who negotiated his dormitory “because you could not do anything in school” – Wang came to believe that these two trends, retail investment and taking Influencers, a decision -making was on a collision race. Between the Gamesop saga, Elon Musk’s ability to “move the markets of Dogecoin and Bitcoin to each tweet”, and the will of people to “really follow ideas and individuals at a whole new level”, Wang decided to abandon in 2021 and start building DUB.
Currently, the average user of the platform is between 30 and 35, explains Wang, although the DUB based in New York clearly finds its way in front of an even younger audience. In recent weeks, the player of this 15 -year -old publisher has questioned more than once on “Investing like Nancy Pelosi” after marinating in Dub advertisements on Instagram.
Pelosi is not negotiated personally on Dub; He is just a trader on the platform reflecting his disclosed movements. However, the idea caught fire. “Nancy Pelosi increased by 123% on DUB with Real Capital,” said Wang, “and we have brought millions of dollars to our customers since the launch of this portfolio on the platform.”
Dub is not free. Wang was determined to generate income from the start, and DUB does it today via a subscription model at $ 10 per month. Wang also says that some “better” portfolios on platform load management costs and the DUB are reduced by 25% of these costs.
Meanwhile, Dub has evolved in part by organic growth. “The creators who are good traders on the application are encouraged to bring their audience,” explains Wang, whose parents immigrated from China and who grew up in Detroit.
Dub also invests aggressively in advertising, strongly leaning on meta-publicities in particular to acquire users, including on Instagram. “We were really lucky where I think that the wider American population really thinks that there are other people who have an advantage over them with regard to the world of investments,” said Wang.
Fighting words
The question is now whether Dub will follow a path similar to that of other fast -growing fintech startups, many of which have been in the regulator reticle. Robinhood disrupted finances by making free exchanges, but he also faced a regulatory exam before his IPO in 2021, finally abandoning a function digital confetti Whenever they did a job.
Dub says he is eager to avoid the same mistakes. The company has spent more than two years working with Finra and SEC before launch, ensuring that its model was in accordance with financial regulations. “We have not only sailed on the regulations at Dub – we kissed it,,Said Wang. (Like Robinhood, Dub is an entirely authorized broker.)
A great distinction, supports Wang, is that DUB is designed to educate users, not just encouraging blind speculation. The platform displays risk scores, risk adjusted at risk and portfolio stability measures to help investors make informed decisions, he said.
He suggests that it is safer for investors than Robinhood. Said Wang: “I have a lot of respect for what [CEO] Vlad [Tenev] did to make trading free. But in the end, making it very easy to exchange without guidance of experts, without education, is really to play for the wider population. »»
To underline its point, Wang underlines Robinhood’s decision – with Coinbase and other exchanges – to make the same Coin Trump available for customers before the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Although it initially increased in price, its price has dropped since. Said Wang, “I think that fundamentally, the incentives are simply poorly aligned between these large platforms which are now public companies which must earn money” and that “generally” their customers have “probably lost money”.
(Is worth noting: in a recent and recent conversation with Robinhood Tenev on Dub, Tenev proposed to Techcrunch that the trading of copies could become more interesting for regulators, and that Dub cannot yet be under “Lorgie Due to its relatively smaller size.)
Anyway, not everyone is sold on Dub’s vision. The biggest blow against Such platformssaid criticism is that the selection of underperform actions the long-term passive investment, with studies showing that the most actively managed funds fail to beat the S&P 500.
It is a criticism with which Wang is familiar – and on which he is quickly rejected. On the one hand, he maintains that many of these studies are “picked”. (“I bet many of them are sponsored by companies of passive investment index,” he says.)
In addition, says Wang, there is a reason why the hedge funds actively managed as a citadel thrive. “If you look at what ultra rich can do, they give Ken Griffin to Citadel their money, [because] They always set up unrealed returns year after year after year, ”he says.
If one more broadly “examines the growth of the space of hedge funds and the asset management space”, continues Wang, “there is a reason why it develops. This is because they make money for their customers. »»
