simple stock app—a ‘Tinder for tickers,’” Pang said. “But it’s much deeper than that. We want you to be able to discover investment ideas, and to use those ideas to drive user engagement. So collaboration is key.”
SparkFin launched a beta version of its mobile app for iOS in October, and a version for the Android operating system is under development. With a small base of about 2,000 beta users, Pang said, SparkFin counted over 500,000 “swipes” in just over three months—or more than 25,000 swipes per week. Pang said generating revenue is not a priority at this time.
More recently, Pang says, a number of professional traders like Greg Harmon of Dragonfly Capital Management and Fusion IQ have begun using SparkFin’s app to share their stock picks and analyses with their newsletter subscribers.
“We want to pull in [financial] news and investor sentiment to help a whole new generation of investors,” Pang said. “We want this to become the de facto way to learn about markets and investing”—especially for the millennials who are more comfortable using a mobile app than a desktop application for buying and selling stocks.
While discount stock brokerage firms like Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade also offer mobile trading apps to their customers, Pang said the discount brokers remain largely dependent on desktop applications for executing customers’ buy and sell orders. He also doesn’t view the discount brokers as competitors, because SparkFin is a mobile social-media app—not a mobile trading app.
As more and more applications go mobile, though, Lindzon and Pang said
they envision a constellation of specialized-but-related mobile apps. In fact, this is already happening with some of Lindzon’s other companies: StockTwits has been integrated with Robinhood, so that investors and traders who are exchanging tips on StockTwits can easily move to Robinhood to buy and sell stocks and ETFs.
Lindzon and Pang view StockTwits as a tool that’s best suited for professional and institutional traders to exchange stock tips and insights, while SparkFin is intended to serve more of a mass media audience as a key tool for sharing and learning information about stocks, ETFs, and markets. They anticipate that SparkFin eventually will tie into Robinhood, and perhaps integrate with online trading applications like Schwab and TD Ameritrade as well.
In a world where people are increasingly using their mobile phones to do things like file their taxes and book overnight accommodations, Linzon and Pang are betting they’ve set the right course for where fintech is headed.
