Dilzafer Singh’s passion for the stock market was born during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown. At home in Hopkinton, the teenager began playing around by trading with a few hundred dollars. He even made around $10,000 on one Tesla option, he said. But, as he started to crave more information about investing, he found it difficult to get everything he wanted in one place.
So Singh, now a 16-year-old rising sophomore at the Groton School, teamed up with a family friend, 18-year-old Raunaq Mokha, to launch a new investing web app. Arcafeed will use AI to cull market indicators relevant to a user’s stock and crypto portfolios to help them make informed decisions. The web app will launch on Sept. 1.
“I realized it was very hard getting access to the right information to make informed decisions. And I realized if someone else was in my shoes, learning about the market can be a very difficult process,” Singh said. “I wanted to take initiative and build this personalized finance platform after seeing all the pain points that investors faced.”
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Singh said his story of pandemic-induced boredom leading to experimentation with investing is common. He pointed to the popularity of apps like Robinhood and the Reddit page WallStreetBets, where the movement to drive up the price of GameStop's stock began. Many of the new traders using these tools were — like him — young and new to the scene.
“A staggering statistic I saw was that the median age of traders pre- to post-pandemic went from 48 years old to 31,” Singh said. “That really opened my eyes to see that there really is this new market segment emerging of young traders.”
Instead of another trading app, Singh wanted to create a hub for information.
Users can’t make investments on Arcafeed. However, Singh said they are working with Plaid, a financial services company, to link users’ stock portfolios to the app. This allows Arcafeed to build a feed of personalized finance news to give users “actionable information,” Singh said.
They hope to expand their offerings to include bite-sized breakdowns of the financial reports that Wall Street traders use, Singh said.
“The average person cannot read a very long financial report,” Singh said. “But that stuff has a lot of insight that’s kind of missing with retail traders.”
While Arcafeed started out as a platform for young or beginning investors, Singh said he sees it being useful for all traders interested in getting personalized financial information delivered straight to them.
The app will cost $4.99 a month. While it will launch as a web app, Singh said they’re looking to bring it to iOS and Android.
Singh said he and co-founder Mokha, an incoming freshman at the University of San Francisco, have been building the app for a year.
“After we had developed our business plan, I was itching to apply my coding skills," Mokha said in an email. "Some of my fondest memories from high school have been of the late nights Dilzafer and I spent debugging code, sometimes until 3 a.m. Nothing is more satisfying than building something from scratch and seeing it thrive."
