Less than a month after earning Best of Show honors in its debut at FinovateFall, social investing platform Voleo has teamed up with the NASDAQ to launch its Voleo Equity Trading Competition. The competition begins Monday, October 9th, and winning investors and investing teams will win $10,000 in real cash portfolios.
“The goals of the competition are to improve financial literacy, to break down the knowledge barrier, and of course, to have fun,” Voleo CEO Thomas Beattie wrote, announcing the contest. “The most important part of investing is starting early and contributing regularly – we believe that participating will teach you a little about the markets, and a lot about yourself,” he said.
Left to right: Voleo’s Olivia Lovenmark (Communications), Thomas Beattie (CEO), and Anthony Tsui (VP Technology) at FinovateFall 2017.
Geared toward college students and millennial investors, the equity trading competition enables investor/trader teams of three or more to form or join an investing club on Voleo. Using the company’s SimuTrader platform, the clubs will manage simulated portfolios of $1 million. Participants can be on more than one club (up to a maximum of five) to allow them to try different investment strategies and methods. The competition ends December 8th. In addition to their share of the $10,000 cash prize, the top teams and investors will be hosted by the Nasdaq for a tour of their MarketSite in Times Square.
With Voleo, members of each investment club vote via the iOS, Android, or web-based app as to which investment ideas the club will pursue. Each trader and investor has the opportunity to make their case on the platform, while the Definitive Return On Investment Decisions (DROID) score keeps track of decisions and hypothetical positions taken to make it easy to spot the top performing investors – as well as those traders whose good investing calls are being overlooked. In putting the wisdom of the crowd above the inclinations of the individual, the platform does not provide for individual accounts, for example, and instead encourages collaborative investing that keeps trading costs down, provides for better diversification, a more educational experience for new investors, and a more collaborative investing environment for everyone.
Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Voleo demonstrated its social trading app at FinovateFall 2017, winning Best of Show. A direct-to-consumer fintech, Voleo has hundreds of live users and thousands of users of its SimuTrader system. In August, Voleo announced it had been selected to participate in PlugAndPlay’s Fintech Fall 2017 program.