Webull's CEO On Empowering Traders Through Education And Community

In the most recent episode of the Fintech Focus Podcast, Benzinga spoke with Anthony Denier, CEO of the zero-commission online trading platform Webull, which this past summer celebrated its first full year as a broker-dealer.

Denier explained how the past year-and-change has shaped Webull into what is heading into 2020.

“On May 21, 2018, we opened up to the public and we went live,” said Denier. “We all kind of had our expectations of you know how many accounts we'd open up, who would care to open up an account, and it's just been outright overwhelming.”

A Changing Broker In A Changing World

Due to its zero-commission model, the types of traders that have signed up to the platform have been extremely diverse. Denier explained that this diversity has helped establish a community within the platform.

“You know it's one thing to send in a request to the Webull helpdesk, say, ‘How do I do this?’ It's another thing to hear it from your peers. We identify a lot of our more active users in the community and ask them to hold some of our new users’ hands and say, ‘Hey this is how I like to do it, this is how I like to set up my buy orders.’”

This early engagement and user experience helped—and continues to help—shape the evolution of the app. Denier focused on many of the social features that encourage and enable users to find and share trading ideas and build a positive ecosystem for traders

“It's been great feedback. Because in today's day and age it's not like it was where you know you have that sit down with your parents and you talk about your portfolio. That doesn't happen anymore. All these conversations now happen in forums online. So we want to be another conversation in that forum by using all the tools that we have and the fact that you know you can do that all for free.”

Training The Trade

The tools and other resources that Webull has implemented over the past year was a continuing theme Denier returned to often during the interview as the key aspect where Webull excels.

Denier said, “You need information to make a good investment choice. That's why we make a very large point in our app. If you look at the updates that we feed to our users we're constantly pushing educational content and we're constantly pushing our paper trading features.”

Denier pointed to the level of sophistication available in the simulated trading tools on Webull, which allows users to screen the universe of stocks and experiment with what technical or fundamental signals work best with each traders strategy and risk profile.

“It's not only buy and sell you can short on our platform,” said Denier. “It's not only a buy long set a limit. You can set bracket orders at the same time you sell a buy order we have five different types of advanced orders whether it's one cancels another one cancels the other one triggers the other bracket orders again. We really try to allow you to figure it out because everyone's trading strategy is going to be different.”

What’s more, the community aspect allows traders to take positions—either simulated or in earnest—on the biggest news affecting the markets.

“On a weekly basis we publish Webull's most active stocks and most active ETFs.,” said Denier. “And you'll see at the top of those lists are always the most volatile names in the market, the ones with the highest beta. The Tilrays, the CRONs, the NIOs of the world. Tesla's become a fan favorite recently, people trading off of Elon's tweets which is always fun because we do allow shorting on the platform as well. You can take either side either side of Elon your on and the activity has been fun to watch.”

According to Denier, it’s this level of engagement and Webull’s focus on allowing traders to take full advantage of the zero-commission model it’s established that will allow it to continue thriving in the years to come.

“There are so many different things that go into the movement of a stock price in order to do it well and do it successfully you have to have the underlying information and that's where Webull differentiates ourselves from every other zero-commission platform.”

Webull is a content partner of Benzinga