Most people don’t remember learning how to invest. That’s because most people never did. Not in school, not at home, not anywhere that counted. Instead, they turn to whoever in their life seems to have it figured out. Maybe a coworker, a friend, or someone who happened to buy the right stock at the right time.
For years, that someone was Priyanka Ranjan.
As a former quantitative strategist at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, Ranjan was constantly on the receiving end of the same questions from friends and colleagues. Is now a good time to invest? Should someone buy the stock their coworker just made money on? How much of their paycheck should actually go toward investing? Her co-founder, Harshit Khandelwal, a senior engineer who spent seven years at Amazon, got asked the same kind of questions from his own circle.
The problem, Ranjan has said, is that a stock tip on its own is nearly useless. Recommending a stock without knowing someone’s personal risk appetite, their goals, or even when they should sell is a lot like a doctor prescribing medication without understanding the patient’s underlying conditions. The misalignment between the advice people ask for and the actual planning they need is what eventually pushed Ranjan and Khandelwal to leave their jobs and build something different: PiTrade.
It was not a cheap or risk-free decision. The two also gave up the stability that comes with roles at firms like Goldman Sachs and Amazon.
Image Credit: PiTrade
Trading Apps Optimized for the Wrong Thing
The last wave of fintech has done a lot right, including commission-free trades, fractional shares, and easy-to-use mobile apps that have helped make investing more accessible. But Ranjan argues the industry offered solutions for trading, not investing, and they don’t always function on the same mechanism. Price alerts, trending tickers, and gamified design are built to get someone to buy a stock often, not to help them build toward a goal.
According to Ranjan, investing should start with two questions that most trading apps never ask:
- What is this money for?
- How much risk can it tolerate?
A retirement fund three decades out, a child’s education fund eight years away, and a travel fund someone plans to use in eighteen months shouldn’t be treated the same way. Yet on most platforms, they often sit in one undifferentiated account, exposed to whatever the user bought almost haphazardly.
That mismatch shows up in the data, too. Long-running investor-behavior research, including studies from DALBAR, has repeatedly found that the average retail investor can underperform with the very funds they hold, a symptom, Ranjan argues, of tools built to encourage reactive, hype-driven decisions instead of a solid and considered plan.
“Stop Picking Stocks, Start Building Portfolios”
PiTrade’s answer to the deficit is a shift in the basic unit of investing. On a trading app, it’s the ticker. On PiTrade, it’s the portfolio, a collection of holdings built around a specific goal, timeline, and risk profile. Users start not by searching for a stock, but by naming what the money is for: retirement, a home, a child’s education, a trip. Each goal becomes its own portfolio, built out from available stocks and ETFs.
PiTrade also lets users share their portfolios so others can mirror their investment activity. This differs from some “follow the investor” tools, where followers may execute trades separately from the person they’re mirroring.
Image Credit: PiTrade
Disclaimer: These images are for illustrative purposes to reflect what the application looks like. This content is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as and may not be relied on in any manner as investment advice, a recommendation of any interest in any security offered herein.
What Comes Next
U.S. equities represent roughly 60% of global stock market capitalization, which remain difficult for many international investors to access due to high broker minimums, fees, and limited product availability. Even so, PiTrade is launching globally to expand access to U.S. markets
Ranjan points to the generational pattern in this space: the unbanked became banked over the last decade, and the next decade’s story is the uninvested becoming invested. Her concern is that simply exporting today’s trading-app playbook to a global, first-time audience would repeat the same mistakes at a larger scale. Access without structure, in her view, isn’t progress, but a repeated problem, just with a broader scope.
PiTrade bets that the biggest opportunity left in fintech isn’t a new asset class or a faster trading feature, but building the structure — goals before tickers, portfolios before picks — that the last decade of investing apps left out entirely.
Image Credit: PiTrade
This post was authored by an external contributor and does not represent Benzinga’s opinions and has not been edited for content. The information contained above is provided for informational and educational purposes only, and nothing contained herein should be construed as investment advice. Benzinga does not make any recommendation to not sell any security or any representation about the financial condition of any company.
Disclaimer: This content is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as and may not be relied on in any manner as investment advice, a recommendation of any interest in any security offered herein. All investments involve risk, including the possible loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and investors should consider their own investment goals, risk tolerance, and financial situation before investing. The information contained herein is subject to change.
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