As The Rush Of New Retail Traders Slows Down, Here's How One Fintech Is Looking To Keep Investors Engaged

The COVID-19 pandemic drew in a lot of new investors to the stock market. Some made money, some lost money, but most will likely continue to be engaged in markets.

Helping investors, both new and existing, achieve the next stage of their growth is Invest Inc, a tool that aggregates and consolidates widespread, fundamental market information.

In learning how the tools help users better assess, analyze and track investments, Benzinga spoke with Invest Inc’s Jacob Fernane.

Here's the conversation that transpired:

Benzinga: Hey Jacob, thanks for taking the time to speak with us, today. Give us the background on yourself and Invest Inc.

Fernane: My background is in corporate finance.

I worked for a family office [whose] primary business is lending in different debt instruments, direct investments, and consulting services. The investing platform was birthed through that main family office, and we’ve hired a few software engineers to start building it out.

The vision there is to build an easy-to-use resource for the beginner, nonprofessional retail traders.

What was the motivation behind Invest Inc?

With the massive increase in retail traders from COVID, we wanted to capitalize on that and help people learn how to use very basic tools, how to read a 10-Q and 10-K, how to dive into an over-the-counter (OTC) traded security, and really do some due diligence.

At what stage of development is the platform now?

It’s still in beta, and we have a very limited number of users.

We’re concluding a $5 million raise and hiring 10 people over the next 60 days. Of those 10 people, six will be developers, so we can work on a web and mobile application.

Eventually, the third phase will be a desktop client.

Tell me about how the platform works?

We’re aggregating data from all the exchanges – Nasdaq, NYSE, OTC – and other high-quality sources.

Big picture, we’re looking towards, probably Q4 of 2022, creating a gamified version of the platform, which is more for like the Reddit traders. So, we’re building out various groups and chats, and different ways people can get involved in trading.

We’ll have paper trading accounts, different competitions, and exercises that help educate on how to trade and analyze data.

What’s a big selling point? What is it that will prompt people to take a closer look?

The must-have will be the education, as well as pieces like Level 2 data, and some other proprietary data feeds.

We’re going to hire professional traders, also. We’re building a media room at the office, which would look more like some of these financial influencer-type setups on Twitch or YouTube, which the younger generation is more accustomed to watching.

It’s going to be a lot of tutorials of them doing due diligence, charting, adding indicators, explaining the basics, watching Level 2 feeds with time and sales.

We’ll even have some micro-cap OTC guys who are watching the penny stocks and trading those, and digging through the statements, and educating on convertible debt, toxic financings, and variable price instruments, and how to find out if a company has them.

Talk to me about the importance of technology to your firm.

We essentially recreated an AI-based reader, and we’re integrating that into our EDGAR data, so people can start having notifications.

If you’re watching a mining stock traded on the OTC exchange, and they put out their 10-Q or OTC markets quarterly disclosures, it will automatically read through the disclosures for specific keywords.

If it sees a convertible instrument or debt entered into, it’ll put a notification out.

Next steps? Future plans?

I think the next tool that’s coming up is a politician tracker that tracks all the different politicians and calculates their annualized gains on the year.

As we start seeing these retail trading numbers come down, social trading isn’t going to be as impactful. If people are going to continue to be retail investors and do well in the market, they need to have somewhat of an edge against others.

That said, we’re motivated in aggregating the highest quality data and having the fastest delivery.

After completing this $5 million raise, we’re going to do subsequent financing and going public on Nasdaq Inc NDAQ. That’s going to continue to open the company up to growth capital and will give us the ability to keep scaling the quality of the product.

Also Read: Wall Street Vet Charles Gradante On GameStop Stock, Naked Shorting and His Support For Retail Traders