.png)
September 18, 2019
I first heard about GI in the Freetrade community, when Marsares who’s really helped spread the word about GI (thank you!), posted about their crowdfunding investment.
When I did a bit more research, I could see straight away how useful GI could be for investors like the Freetrade customers who I spoke with so often.
It’s early days for the challenger stockbrokers and so far, their apps have focused on the essentials like enabling investors to place orders. You open the apps and get very few hints about which companies and funds to check out. Creating a desktop interface for example, to enable those investors to analyse their portfolio and find investments more easily will be a huge help. In fact, it’s the third most popular request in the Freetrade community right now.
The challengers’ apps will get more sophisticated over time of course and brokers like Hargreaves Lansdown already provide more information about securities in theirs. But they don’t make it very easy to get to a decision — it’s difficult to compare two securities or to translate the individual pieces of information from a company’s accounts into a more meaningful summary of their overall performance.
That’s why I think it’s important for GI to just focus on providing those sorts of insights, rather than being distracted by collecting data or dealing stocks. There’s so many ways to help people make more informed investment decisions that there needs to be a company which just does this.
On top of that, it’s fantastic to see that there’s a large group of investors who’re so excited about this idea that they were willing to make the investment that was needed to get the company started. It’s only right that those early customers have a chance to share in the success of GI.
Needless to say, I’m a big believer in the value of communities for startups too so seeing that GI had the beginnings of one, was very encouraging.
The thing that struck me most when I met Truman, Yuchen and Al was how sincere they were about wanting to give individual investors the opportunity to be as successful as institutional investors. Their passion for the GI mission is infectious.
It’s also great to be working in Rise London which is a little bit comfier than some of the other startup’s offices I’ve seen and for someone who can never get enough coffee, having a cafe downstairs was definitely appealing!
I hope everyone reading this sees just as much potential in GI and I’m really looking forward to getting to know the community better. We need as much of your feedback as possible to help build a service that transforms the way that you make investment decisions. So if you have any ideas or just want to say hello, please do drop me a DM or post them in the community.
