An app making investing fun
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For as long as I remember, I’ve been reading on the internet that investing in companies we believe in can be really useful for the future.
It can create a new source of income to solidify our financial position
After all of what happened last year, people are more aware of how simple is to lose everything. A job, savings, and other things in a little amount of time.
The reason some, now more than ever, are willing to invest even a small portion of their money into the market and hope it will grow in the next few months or years to be more financially stable.
Investing is defined according to Investopedia as:
Buying an asset or item with the goal of generating income or appreciation
That means buying a small portion of a company (Stocks) on a marketplace where these assets are being traded expecting gaining money in the future.
These activities were looked at as something a small portion of the population, people with big amounts of money and power, could do but thanks to the internet all have changed.
In the span of the last 10 years, Companies have been created or changed to make the market more “open” to people like you and me. Apps like RobinHood, set how the environment could look like with things like:
Free Commissions on every trade
Easy usability and access (apps and websites)
Cryptocurrencies trade
& more
Making companies like TD Ameritrade, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, E*TRADE, Interactive Brokers, which were know as the old generation, change their own services to compete for this market. Ordinary people with the desire of investing.
As the competition was more visible between every single trader, more people are interested in the stock market, embarking on their first experiences as investors.
According to Citadel Securities, individual investors by 2020 make up 20 percent of all stock market activity on average — where that share was just 10 percent in 2019.
I have always been interested in financial markets, in fact, I remember in middle school, I memorized the finance section of my local newspaper.
I was the kid shouting in my class and to my family:
The Dow was up 3%,
The Borsa Italiana was down 1.1%,
FTSE probably will be higher by 0.3% by the end of the quarter
I didn’t even knew at the moment what that meant but I was excited to see the information and that’s why today I wanted to talk about a company I found online that makes investments fun and created a community around their product.
The company is Public
The photo was taken on their website. Public.com
Founded in 2019 in New York City, the financial capital of the US, this social investing network company allows companies and individuals to buy public stock with any amount of money.
In there, after you create an account you are able to purchase a little portion of a company that trades in the market while writing your opinion about it to other like-minded people with similar goals in the same way as any other social media platform.
When I discovered how this new way of investment was, how you could share on a post why you decided to give money to a brand or stock, brought me back to 2019 where I was attending my favorite class at university, in fact, called Financial Markets.
In the class, I had a project to create a “hedge fund” with my friends and invest using a virtual market simulator. Every group member started with $100,000 each and then they could decide where to put their money based on the fund mission or type of portfolio.
Some were focused on the food industry, some in tech, others groups in fashion but no matter the market, over the span of the entire class, I learned about indexes, ETFs, Short selling, how to diversify, and many more things about the topic.
Every single decision we made was a discussion and exchange of opinions where I learned a lot from it.
Now, with Public it’s the same, the only difference would be that these discussions could happen not just with classmates as I did but with anyone around the world, from beginners just like me to world-class investors and share our knowledge of what we know about any company.
Public started with the same services as the other apps but it has developed a relationship with their users as no other.
It has created some secondary features that make the app more appealing to the masses, things like:
Social focus, where it has created a large community of fans
Stock Gifts, where you could select a stock, send it away to your friends and they will receive up to $50 of free stock. No sign-up required. Just for fun
T-Shirts with a stock name on them. To turn your favorite investments into something to show off.
The Invest Hat, probably my favorite one as you cannot get it until you’re an active member of the Public Community. Look at it, so cool!
Inside the app’s community of investors, I’ve seen that it has a more diversified user base than any other of their competitors, from Latinos, Black Communities, LGBTQ members. In fact, according to Public, approximately of their total count of users, 40% are women.
Making it a place that no matter where you come from or who you are, you can participate, a complete change compared to how it was in the past.
Currently, the app is only available in the US but it will expand more broadly over the years as it recently raised $65 million last December, thanks to its social focus.
I cannot wait to have access to it in more markets and stock exchanges around the world as we’re more globalized than ever.
This kind of apps received a lot of hate recently as it allows people to almost lose all their money due to their poor-made decisions, which were against what the market was telling but Public.com as it is focused on the social part of investing, people will have more information to learn from and make better choices.
A huge help for people beginning in this kind of thing.
I love when a brand disrupts a part of an industry by using the internet and Public is an example of it. They created new ways to grab the user’s attention and let them build what was best for their product.
Making a place where investment looks fun and everyone can participate without any restrictions.
Let’s see what the company builds next, and how soon we get a taste for its future plans. I’m looking forward to it
If you have a goal to grow your sources of income and investing looks like an option give this app a try, I think it makes it really easy to start.
Who knows, maybe investing could become your new thing
Until next week,
Jose
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