The idea was to simplify investments as much as possible - you don't have to read reports and understand the market, instead, with one button you can copy the deals of top investors, hedge funds, and famous people.

Subscription cost $10 per month + $25 fee for duplicating top portfolios. The program has already been downloaded by 800,000+ users.

Journalist Connie Loizos wrote:

Social media has changed everything from news consumption to shopping. Now Dub believes it can do the same for investing through an influencer-driven marketplace where users can follow the deals of top investors with just a few taps. Think of it as TikTok meets Wall Street.

Founded by 23-year-old Steven Wang—a Harvard dropout who started investing in his sophomore year with his parents’ blessing—Dub is betting that the future of investing is not about picking stocks, but about picking people. The app lets users follow the strategies of traders, hedge funds, and even those who impersonate high-ranking politicians. Instead of making individual trading decisions, Dub users can copy entire portfolios.

Dub has already surpassed 800,000 downloads and raised $17 million in seed funding — and a new round appears to be in the works. It’s less clear whether Dub will be able to avoid the pitfalls of previous fintech startups.

Inspired by GameStop

Retail investing has evolved dramatically over the past two decades. The days of $7 trading fees and clunky brokerage interfaces were shattered about a decade ago by mobile platforms like Robinhood, which invited people to trade for free. At the same time, social media is changing the way people, especially Gen Z, make financial decisions.

As a Harvard student during the pandemic, trading from his dorm room “because there was nothing to do in school,” Wang came to believe that these two trends, retail investing and influencer-driven decision-making, were on a collision course. Despite the GameStop saga, Elon Musk’s ability to “move the Dogecoin and Bitcoin markets with every tweet,” and people’s willingness to “really follow ideas and people on a whole new level,” Wang decided to drop out in 2021 and start building Dub.

The average user on the platform is currently between 30 and 35 years old, Wang says, though Dub, a New York-based company, is clearly looking to reach an even younger audience. In recent weeks, a 15-year-old editor has been asked repeatedly about “investing like Nancy Pelosi” after being featured in Dub’s Instagram ads.

Pelosi doesn’t personally trade Dub; she’s just a trader on the platform who mirrors her disclosed moves. But the idea caught on. “Nancy Pelosi has been up 123% in Dub with real capital,” says Wang, “and we’ve made millions of dollars for our clients since that portfolio launched on the platform.”

Dub isn’t free. Wang was determined to generate revenue from the start, and Dub does that today with a $10-per-month subscription model. Additionally, Wang says some of the “top” portfolios on the platform charge management fees, and Dub cuts those fees by 25%.

Meanwhile, Dub has grown partly through organic growth. “Creators who do well on the app have an incentive to engage their audience,” says Wang, whose parents emigrated from China and grew up in Detroit.

Dub is also heavily investing in advertising, especially using meta ads to engage users, particularly on Instagram. “We’re really lucky that I think the American population really believes that there are other people who have an advantage over them when it comes to the investment world,” says Wang.

Fighting words

The question is whether Dub will follow the same path as other fast-growing fintech startups, many of which have come under regulatory scrutiny. Robinhood disrupted finance by making trading free, but also faced regulatory scrutiny ahead of its 2021 IPO, eventually ditching a feature that showered users with digital confetti every time they made a trade.

Dub says it’s committed to avoiding the same mistakes. The company spent more than two years working with FINRA and the SEC before launching, ensuring its model was compliant with financial regulations. “We didn’t just follow regulation at Dub — we embraced it,” says Wang. (Like Robinhood, Dub is a fully licensed broker-dealer.)

The big difference, Wang argues, is that Dub is designed to educate users, not just encourage blind speculation. The platform displays risk metrics, risk-adjusted returns and portfolio stability metrics to help investors make informed decisions, he says.

He believes it’s safer for investors than Robinhood. Wang says, “I really respect what [CEO] Vlad [Tenev] has done to make trading free. But at the end of the day, making trading super easy without expert guidance, without education, is just gambling for the general public.”

To make his point, Wang points to Robinhood’s decision — along with Coinbase and other exchanges — to make the meme coin TRUMP available to customers ahead of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. While it initially skyrocketed in price, its price subsequently plummeted. Wang says, “I think fundamentally the incentives are just not aligned between these big platforms, which are now public companies that need to make money,” and that “overall” their customers “probably lost money.”

(It’s worth noting: In a separate recent conversation with Robinhood’s Tenev about Dub, Tenev suggested to TechCrunch that copy trading could become more of an interest to regulators and that Dub may not yet be under the “magnifying glass” due to its relatively smaller size.)

In any case, not everyone shares Dub's vision. Critics say the biggest drawback to such platforms is that stock picking is less effective for passive investing over the long term, and research shows that most active funds fail to beat the S&P 500.

It’s a criticism Wang is familiar with—and one he’s quick to dismiss. First, he argues that much of this research is “selective.” (“I’m sure a lot of it is sponsored by passive index companies,” he says.)

There’s also a reason, says Wang, that actively managed hedge funds like Citadel are thriving. “If you look at what the ultra-rich can do, they give their money to Ken Griffin at Citadel, [because] they consistently deliver uncorrelated returns year after year,” he says.

"If you look more broadly at the growth of the hedge fund space and the asset management space," Wang continues, "there's a reason why it's growing. It's because they're making money for their clients."

I wonder how this will affect cryptocurrency transactions?