Social media changed everything from the consumption of news in Pazar. Now, DUB thinks it can do the same to invest through an influential market, where users can track high investor trade with some taps. Think about it while Tiktok meets Wall Street.
Founded by 23-year-old Steven Wang-Harvard’s abandonment that began investing in the second grade with the blessing of his parents-dub is betting that the future of investments is not about taking action but taking people. The app allows users to follow traders’ strategies, defensive funds and even those who imitate high -profile politicians. Instead of making individual trade decisions, DUB users can copy all portfolios.
The concept has hit a chord. The DUB has already exceeded 800,000 downloads and raised $ 17 million in seed funding – with a new round in the works. Less clear is whether the DUB can avoid the obstacles of previous fintech beginnings.
Inspired by Gamestop
Retail has evolved dramatically over the past two decades. The days of the 7 dollars of trading commissions and clumsy brokerage interfaces were blown up nearly a decade ago from the first mobile platforms like Robinhod inviting people to trade free. At the same time, social media is reforming how people, and especially members of General Z, make financial decisions.
As a Harvard student during the pandemia-he traded from his dormitory room “because you could do nothing in school” -wang came to believe that these two trends, retail and influential decisions were in a course of the collision. Among the Gamestop saga, Elon Musk’s ability to “move the markets of dogeco and bitcoin with every tweet”, and people’s willingness to “really follow ideas and individuals on a whole new level”, Wang decided to abandon in 2021 and begin construction of DUB.
For now, the average platform user is between 30 and 35, says Wang, though the New York -based DUB is clearly finding its way to an even younger audience. In recent weeks, the 15-year-old of this editor has asked more than once about “Investment like Nancy Pelosi” after marinating in DUB ads on Instagram.
Pelosi is not in person trading in DUB; It is just a trader on the platform that reflects its unfolded movements. However, the idea has caught fire. “Nancy Pelosi has grown to 123% in the real capital with real capital,” says Wang, “and we’ve made our clients millions of dollars since that wallet was launched on the platform.”
DUB is not free. Wang was determined to generate revenue from the beginning, and DUB does so today through a $ 10 per month reconciliation model. Wang further says that some “high” portfolio in platform tariff management fees and DUB receive a 25% reduction in those tariffs.
Meanwhile, the DUB is partially scaled through organic growth. “Creators who are good traders in the app have been stimulated to bring their audience,” says Wang, whose parents emigrated from China and grew up in Detroit.
DUB is also investing aggressively in advertising, highly relying on Meta ads in particular to receive users, including on Instagram. “We have been really lucky, where I think the broader American population really believes there are other people there who have an advantage over them when it comes to the world of investment,” Wang says.
Combat
Now the question is whether the DUB will follow a similar path like other fast -growing fintech beginnings, many of which have found themselves in regulators’ chairs. Robinhood interrupted finances making the trading free, but also faced a 2021 regulatory check in front of its IPO, finally rejecting a feature that shower users with digital confetti whenever they made a trade.
DUB says it is prone to avoid the same mistakes. The company spent more than two years working with Finra and the SEC before it began, ensuring that its model respected financial regulations. “We didn’t just navigate the regulation in the Dub – we hugged it,“Says Wang. (As Robinhood, DUB is a fully licensed intermediary licensed.)
A big difference, Wang argues, is that DUB is created to educate users, not just encourage blind speculation. The platform shows risk results, risk -regulated returns, and portfolio stability metrics to help investors make informed decisions, he says.
He suggests that he is safer for investors than Robinhood. Says Wang: “I have a lot of respect for what (CEO) Vlad (Tenev) has done in making free trading. But at the end of the day, making it super easy for trade without expert guidance, without education, is really just gambling for the wider population. “
To underline his point, Wang points to Robinhood’s decision – along with Coinbase and other exchanges – to make the MEME Trump available to clients before President Donald Trump’s inauguration. While it initially raised in price, its price has fallen since then. Says Wang, “I think in essence the incentives are simply misinformed among these big platforms that are public companies now that they have to make money” and that “generally” their customers have “probably lost money”.
(It is worth noting: In a special conversation, recently with Robinhood’s Tenev about Dub, Tenev proposed to Techcrunch that duplicate trading can be made of greater interest to regulators, and that DUB may not be still under the “magnifying glass” due to its relatively smaller size.)
Be that as it may, not everyone is sold in the DUB vision. The biggest knock against such platforms, critics say, is that taking stock underestimates passive investment for the long run, with studies showing that the most managed funds actively fail to defeat S&P 500.
It is a criticism by which Wang is known – and on which he is quick to push back. For one thing, he argues that many such studies are “chosen cherries”. (“I bet many of them are sponsored by passive investment index companies,” he says.)
Further, says Wang, there is one reason that actively managed protective funds like Citadel are flourishing. “If you look at what ultra -rich ultras can do, they are giving their money Ken Griffin to Citadel, (because) they are constantly imposing non -interconnected returns year after year,” he says.
If one more broadly “looks at the increase in the defense fund space and the asset management space,” Wang continues, “there is a reason why it is growing. This is because they are making money for their customers.”
