A Houston-based company is launching a platform to deliver actionable financial insights to retail investors.
Tradefluence launched its peer-to-peer platform for stock market trends and signals on Feb. 8. The app is available on iOS devices; Tradefluence plans to add Android support in the near future, the company said.
The Tradefluence platform was created for stock traders who were willing to pay for market insights. Millions of new retail investors entered the markets during the Covid-19 pandemic to trade stocks, cryptocurrencies and other securities.
For trading advice, many new retail investors turned to the internet and social media websites — like Reddit's WallStreetBets, where users helped fuel growth in stocks like GameStop (NYSE: GME) and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. (NYSE: AMC) last year. Anonymous retail traders, like the later-unmasked Keith "Roaring Kitty" Gill, made millions on GameStop, while certain hedge funds shorting the stock took huge losses.
The GameStop saga can help explain a core tenet of the Tradefluence platform: Everyday retail investors, not just big-money investment advisories, can deliver market advice that other traders will pay for.
"We have defined ourselves as a marketplace, and it's a marketplace for equities right now," said Peter Griscom, co-founder and CEO of Tradefluence. "Next month, it will be a marketplace for equities and crypto."
But unlike anonymous internet forums, Tradefluence aims to build trust through transparency. Users of the platform can subscribe to influencers, or "Tradefluencers," for market advice, signals and trends. Tradefluencers can offer subscriptions to users for free, or they can charge a fee for their insights, Griscom said. Users can then evaluate a Tradefluencers' track record with their total return, average return and trades per week.
"It takes about a month or two months to generate a substantive track record, but our top performer has a 600% return in a down market over two months," Griscom said.
Tradefluence is coming off of a soft launch, where the platform saw traffic from 13,000 active users in its first month. The company plans to introduce features for crypto, sports betting and non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, in the future.
Tradefluence employs a team of eight and aims to hire another 10 to 15 employees this spring. The company is in the midst of raising a $5 million seed capital round, Griscom said. The firm operates out of Common Desk space in the Uptown area, but Tradefluence is eyeing a move into dedicated office space in the next few months.
