Want to invest like Buffett? dub CEO explains copy trading

The investment portfolios of several high-ranking US lawmakers, including Representative and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.), are outpacing the S&P 500 (^GSPC) in returns. Congressional leaders' stock trading has been a subject of controversy in recent years.

dub Founder and CEO Steven Wang sits down with Julie Hyman on Asking for a Trend to explain the concept of "copy trading" on his brokerage platform, which allows investors to buy into a portfolio formed around politicians and business leaders' own investments. The dub platform also has portfolios built around Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett's portfolios too.

"The whole idea is we want to bring more trust and transparency to the system. So we've seen not just Nancy Pelosi, that's one of the recent trends of politicians, but also the meme stock craze. Two weeks ago and this past week... even star fund managers like Cathie Wood," Wang tells Yahoo Finance. "And this really goes to the theme that I think we're seeing in the markets broadly of Gen Z, Millennials, and the younger generation retail traders — it's no longer about sitting by a bunch of screens and looking at the numbers. It's about following people and ideas. And that is where the puck is going..."

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Asking for a Trend.

This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video transcript

Well, if you're looking to outperform the market, forget Wall Street, maybe look to Washington last year, several politicians including Nancy Pelosi, Susan Collins and Richard Blumenthal saw they, they beat the S and P 500 returns in their personal portfolios.

It only was it if only it was as easy as copying their trades, right?

Well, actually it is, it's literally called copy trading.

And dub is one of the platforms that's making it possible.

Founder and CEO of D. Steven Wang is joining us now with more on that trend.

Hey, Steven, thanks for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

So copy trading.

Now it's interesting because on Twitter, I see people all the time talk about Nancy Pelosi's portfolio or what have you.

Um But now like how does it work?

You just click and you say I wanna follow Nancy Pelosi and trade, like do the same thing.

Absolutely.

So we're brokerage similar to Robin and or Schwab, you can not a brokerage account with us and you can scroll through portfolios and portfolios are basket of stocks very similar to ETF and these portfolios are trading different and strategies.

So we've got people who've made portfolios that are copying politician trades like Nancy Ploy or even hedge fund managers, and also just really good traders that you can copy.

And instead of really picking stocks, now you just pick a portfolio that you want to invest alongside.

With the same way, you invest $10 in Tesla, you can take $10 to copy portfolio.

And after you started copying one, every trade that's made by the cop creator of the portfolio you automatically get.

So it's really bring this idea of, hey, if you don't really know how to navigate the markets, you can now trust someone and it just happens to be.

So some of our hottest portfolios are copying and tracking the trades of Nancy Ploy who's up actually on the platform 55% this year annually.

Well, I was gonna say so.

So the they you can see the history of how these different folks have done and make your determination, not just based on who it is, but what their performance has been.

Absolutely.

And the the whole idea is we want to bring more trust and transparency system.

So we've seen not just Nancy Pelosi, that's one of the recent trends of politicians, but also the meme stock craze two weeks ago.

And this past week, the 1.0 even star funders like Kathy Wood.

And this really goes to the theme that I think we're seeing the markets probably of Gen Z millennials and the younger generation of retail traders.

It's no longer about sitting by a bunch of screens and looking at the numbers.

It's about following people and ideas and that is where the puck is going.

We've already seen it happen with the meme stock craze starting in 2020 idea of the influencer economy really coming into investing and that's the vision of dub it's beyond copying just politicians, which is a small part of it.

We're really building the social investing platform that products, this completely new consumer behavior that we're seeing.

So who are some of the most popular people on the platform?

So we've got a hedge fund manager from a former millennium hedge fund manager who's trading the Nancy Pelosi portfolio.

And he's using his quantitative algos to actually model what Nancy Pelosi's trades are.

Who's actually not just what Nancy's doing.

And Nancy is actually very hard to replicate for regular retail investor because she's doing a lot of options, shorting and that may not be really accessible to large population.

We've also got one of our most popular portfolios is recent Bitcoin.

So uh we've got a quantitative Algo trading, Bitcoin and it's built to better manage risk A I is another really hot trend.

And we've also got some really incredible just uh investors that are popular and like seeking Alpha and Twitter or X and they've already built followings and they've come on to dub and they are now managing hundreds of thousands, they aggregate millions of dollars.

Now on the platform, it is retail people that really blame what they're doing.

That's what we really want power.

And this is a shout out to any talented investor out there.

One of the core fundamental visions of what we want to do is build a platform where you don't need to be in Wall Street uh and spend millions of dollars in years to launch an ETF or hedge fund in five minutes.

You can make a portfolio and you can be copying or getting copied by other people.

Um I'm gonna play devil's out again for a second here because it just so happens that I just watched an opinion piece from another influencer.

I guess you could call her Kyla Scanlan who is a commentator and she cites ironically, since I could, I would call her sort of a influencer herself, she cites a recent study that showed that influencers don't actually do very well.

And so the people who follow them don't actually do very well.

And so how like, how do you sort of correct for that, this sort of cult of personality?

Like, what are the risks of, of mixing the cult of personality with investing?

You know, I saw that same piece and I actually, that is what Kyla said is actually fundamental to dubs thesis of drive driving trust and transparency system.

You're actually totally right people, I saw it recent just based on the latest numbers from the meme Stock race even last week, people lost $13 billion on the Gamestop and a MC crash down.

So how do you prevent that?

And with Dub, we're bringing order of validate a real track record since we are the brokerage.

It is important to note that we're actually the only regulated platform in the United States to offer copy trading.

Uh We're a broker dealer member of Finra and regulated by the SEC and that holds us to a higher bar and standard for really making sure that when someone comes on to dub, you're seeing the actual trades that they've made, you get to see their actual track record and we are validating um what they've done.

So if you go on Twitter today, they could Photoshop some image or they can post about some stock, but you never know what if that's true or not.

So we, so it's almost we hope in five, a couple of years from now that hey, if you're an influencer and you're not un dubbed, that's gonna be an issue because you're maybe afraid of hiding the truth, right?

Of actually, if you're good at investing or not.

And that is to do dubs the ethos of, hey, we really wanna bring trust to the system, Steven.

Great to meet you.

Thanks for coming in.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for having us.

Thank you.