Learn By Doing

Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Dave Grohl is famously against guitar lessons.

His thinking is the best way to learn how to play guitar is to just play guitar, rather than have someone show you.

This concept is true for a lot of things, as David Gloobar pointed out in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Referencing a 2018 weight loss study by the Journal of the American Medical Association, Gloobar noted that both subject groups had actually consumed fewer calories than they normally would have after adopting a healthy diet for the sake of the one-year study.

To Gloobar, a college educator, this study reinforced what he’d seen. “In my experience, the best learning occurs when students teach themselves — when they discover something on their own,” he wrote. “And that’s what happened in this medical study.”

This concept is called experiential learning, and you don’t need to look very far to see how far it’s spread in recent years.

Meal kit services like Blue Apron Holdings Inc APRN and HelloFresh have taken this approach to cooking. They don’t teach you how to cook—they simply give you the ingredients and make it as easy as possible. Is there a better way for a novice in the kitchen to get started?

Peloton takes the trendy fitness class and puts it directly inside your house. What do you get when you combine gym-grade equipment with world-class instructors in the privacy of your home? Just like Blue Apron, the Peloton bike puts its customers a position to succeed from the outset—all they have to do is get on the bike.

So why hasn’t this approach been taken with trading options? Robo-advisors have made asset allocation easier than ever for long-term investors, but someone wanting to learn about the world of options has the unenviable choice between cumbersome legacy platforms and new ones that weren’t built specifically with options in mind.

This is why we started Gatsby. We believe the reason the options market hasn’t become more popular among the younger generations of investors is not because of a lack of interest, but because no one has developed an easy way to learn.

So we cut down on the jargon, reorganized the options matrix into a cleaner mobile experience, and got rid of trading commissions entirely. Three of the biggest hurdles to trading options, out the window.

Options, like anything, can be tricky to master. But with simplicity at the core of Gatsby’s design, our hope is that we can open this market up to those who previously felt like an outsider looking in.

The easier something is to do, the easier it is to learn, the easier it is to excel.

All you have to do is start.

Ryan Belanger-Saleh is the co-founder and co-CEO of Gatsby, a commission-free options trading platform.