A Fundamental Analysis of investFeed.
Welcome back!
Before I dive into this, I would like to say a word of thanks to the following people for spreading my previous analysis of LINX:
@CryptoTimm
@sidathsaumya
@Blockarticles
@linXcoin (The LINX twitter)
@Cryptomickey
Give these people a follow!
Without further adieu, I would like to dive right into the thick of things. I will be covering the product, the people behind it, and their background.
Before us we have investFeed, usually stylized like this, which I like. It's unique, and the lower-case i, followed by an upper-case word, could very well draw people because they've developed a comfort with, and attachment to that format, as a result of Apple's "i-insert uppercase word here" advertisement campaign.
It's an aesthetic familiarity bias, a thing I would (unfortunately) never underestimate a traders ability, beginner or seasoned, to fall victim too. As humans, it's simply in our nature to gravitate to the familiar, due to our ancestors need to make snap life or death decisions while being assaulted with massive amounts of stimuli & information.
Moving on, investFeed aims to be a "Next Generation Social Investment Network", as announced in the BitcoinTalk ANN thread (link available at the bottom of this article), with their website (also provided at the bottom) boldly and succinctly, reiterating this aim by stating that they in fact, are building the worlds first cryptocurrency social investment network, a project targeting not just traders and investors, but various industry professionals, media entities, and block-chain companies as well. They are actually currently providing add space to a new ICO, ChronoLogic, throughout the website now, backing that last facet of their target audiences up. I should add here that they also have both Android and iOS apps live on their respective stores.
In addition to this, they aim to bring transparency, trust, and openness to the financial markets. They aim to deliver a project that accomplishes this goal in a number of interconnected ways. Their product allows full integration with your brokerage to track all of your trades. The performance of the trades, and portfolio of every investor who integrates their brokerage will be available on their feed, allowing copy/shadow traders to make an unprecedentedly informed decision about who and what trades they're willing to bet their money on. Compounding upon this, they seek to set a precedent in the way performance is measured, moving from stock indexes, to other traders, as a a measuring stick, if you will. This fun but competitive set up that delivers bragging rights, and for all to see, I believe, is definitely going to bring a lot of energy, drive and passion to the trading community that develops.
(inb4 someone gets super margin call liquidated REKT in front of god-damned everyone.)
They want to create an environment that allows what they say is the up to 52% of individuals (though no source for this number is given), who do not interact with the stock markets, because they lack trust in the markets themselves, or their ability to play them successfully.
I would like to point out that as we see more cryptocurrency exchange adjacent websites and services pop up, those that allow trading of what I like to call the "old markets", such as FOREX and NASDAQ, will out perform those that don't, and I believe this is simply because cryptocurrency is extremely alienating to people who only know those markets. A web-service/trading based platform that allows FOREX traders to observe the workings of crypto trades and traders, amongst themselves, throughout their careers, will allow them to develop familiarity and trust in the cryptoeconomy, at their own pace, as opposed to the abrupt culture shock of browsing crypto twitter. A person who is only in the old markets, interacting with someone who trades both crypto markets, and old markets, and can help bridge the gap between the two; these kind of interactions will do wonders for bringing legitimacy to cryptocurrency in the eyes of it's skeptics.
As we have seen with other projects, forecasting and prediction will play a role in investFeeds product, claiming that they will help mitigate risk on behalf of the investor, using analytics and reporting tools that leverage data from verifiable investors to gauge market sentiment, predict trends, and forecast other critical market event moments for traders.
Diving further into the processes that will hopefully actualize these goals, they have set up a functional ecosystem, in which contributors earn FEED, a token allowing for the giving and receiving of incentive for quality content, purchasing premium content from users in multiple media forms, and the promotion of ones own content to other traders, by sharing their portfolios, trades, and the aforementioned premium content.
Users can also earn FEED through comments, likes and shares, creating a loop between consumer and producer within the platform. I think this is going to be a hit aspect of this product, as I've seen a lot of monetization of calls, and teaching, information and gossip in crypto twitter lately. This will allow for a more legitimized version of this micro-information economy. There will be live streaming, cross platform messaging, multi-media content design options, a 500 character post limit, and the ability to post portfolio, holdings and trade information directly into the stream of content. Users will also be able to place trades directly on the platform using their Bitcoin and Ethereum accounts via third party integration of existing platforms.
(It's very speculative, but imagine if you can buy and sell from your Trex wallets here to other traders while conversing with them?)
In adjunct of this, with their intent to allow brokerage/portfolio integration with user profiles, they have already formed several channel partnerships, with brokerage providers such as:
Robinhood, a mobile app that lets you trade stocks without fees, which is currently valued at $1.3B USD, has processed over $50B USD in transactions, and has over two million users, handling $3.18B in assets, as of a FINRA audit in 2015, this number is likely to be higher at present date. Also a member of SIPC, the Securities Investor Protection Corporation.
Fidelity, listed as the 19th largest company in America, a multinational financial services corporation, with a yearly revenue of $5.9B USD, an AUM of $2.3T, and a recent record high AuA of $5.7T, most of which are in Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, outperforming 72% of their peers at their peak.
TD Ameritrade, with a net revenue of $3.3B in 2016, currently valued at 20 to 23B USD, with currently just under 29B in AUM, shares of which also just recently rallied past their ATH of $46.94 to 47.03, and a total AUM of 778B USD.
(These are all numbers drawn from statements of financial condition from the last 1-3 years.)
I don't think I have to tell you that this is a good sign, as the amount of pure wealth, and information/results predicated upon that level of wealth, that will thusly flow through and around this platform, is sheer obscenity. Every single person and entity that is a part to the whole that is these staggering numbers, can benefit from and make use of this platform, in the handling of their trades and assets, and there will most likely be more partnerships of this kind and magnitude.
The Faces of investFeed.
Ronald Chernesky, CEO :
Work History: CEO & Co-founder of investFEED for 3yrs, 8mos, from January 2014 to present.
Head of U.S Equities Trading at World Trade Financial Group for 2yrs, 6mos, from April 2011 to September 2013.
Provides institutional, proprietary trading, and fusion technology solutions and services.
- Senior Equity Trader at Avatar Securities for 1yr, 2mos from February 2010 to March 2011.
A proprietary trading broker-dealer based in New York City.
- Equities Trader at Dimension Brokerage LLC for 4yrs, 11mos, from April 2005 to February 2010.
Provides securities trading and execution services for equities, options, and futures. Additionally, the firm offers clearing and risk disclosure services.
- Dark Pool Traders.
Founder for 6mos, left in 2009.
Project description: A platform specifically aimed at dark pool traders, or people who trade stock privately, sometimes anonymously, out of reach of the public. Very well could have been a step towards the development of investFeed.
- Thinking Alpha.
CEO, 1yr, 4mos, led merger into investFeed in January 2014.
Project Description: a contributor platform for financial writers and bloggers.
The Thinking Alpha website states "Thinking Alpha is an Ethereum-based decentralized investor contributor platform which rewards users with app tokens for peer-reviewing and contributing information. We aim to be the starting points of the financial markets for finding reliable, transparent information."
It sounds to me very much like Chernesky killed two birds with one stone via the merger of these two platform concepts, trimmed some fat, and conceptualized investFeed.
- Andrew Freedman, CTO & Co-Founder :
Co-Founder and CTO of investFeed for 3yrs, 3mos, from January 2014 to present.
IT Consultant for Midpoint Solutions LLC for 2yrs, 1mo, from January 2013 to January 2015.
Midpoint Solutions specializes in software engineering and consulting .
- Developer for WTS Proprietary Trading Group for 4yrs, from January 2009 to to December 2012
Operates as a proprietary trading firm. The firm offers securities trading education, software, and training and trading tools.
- Co-Founder and CTO of Darkpool Trader, less than a year.
- Justin Jovanovic, COO :
COO of investFeed, for 3yrs, from 2014 to present.
Founder of 360 eTicketing LLC, for 2yrs, from 2013-2015.
Software development, licensing, and third party international event ticketing.
- Risk Manager at World Trade Securities, for 1yr, from 2013 to 2015.
Privately owned proprietary trading firm based in NYC, New York and a member of the CBSX and is SEC registered.
- Sales & Marketing Manager at ArtAssure Ltd, for 1yr, from 2012 to 2013.
An art finance firm dedicated to minimizing uncertainty and risk for both sellers and purchasers of fine art through innovative strategies and financial services.
- Tarryn Valle, CFA :
Financial Consultant for investFeed, for 11mos, from November 2016 to present.
Head Tutor & Mentor for GetSmarter, for 2yrs and 8mos, from February 2015 to present.
An online education company based in Cape Town and London. We collaborate with leading universities to offer premium online short courses to working professionals.
I think it's imperative to add this quote from Tarryn's LinkedIn page, as it relates highly to the current role she plays at investFeed.
As the Head Tutor for the Managerial Finance module as part of the UCT Postgraduate Diploma in Management and Marketing, I cover accounting, investment analysis, capital budgeting and working capital management.
- Business Development & Operations for Blue Quadrant Capital Management, for 1yr, 10mos, from Apr 2015 to Jan 2017.
Generalist undertaking various functions, responsible for business development, risk management and analytical work.
In a business development capacity, handled communication with institutional &retail investors, including the production of pitch books, website management, email distribution and face-to-face investor meetings.
Risk management duties entailed the build, maintenance, and computation of internal risk systems and measures including bespoke VaR and liquidity measures.
Analysis work centred around building and maintaining macroeconomic data models & industry and company screening metrics.
As you can see, the investFeed team is stacked with people who are educated and experienced in the financial, technological, and over-lapping fields.
I will cap my background research here, so as to avoid making this too lengthy, but feel free to google the other names above, as I do not at all mean to underplay the importance of, and effect of their role in the future of the investFeed platform.
In fact, if you're investing, you should feel obligated too.
Additional info:
investFeed is currently a low-cap crypto, with a market cap of $8,069,533, and the supply hard cap being 191,381,257, currently priced at $0.042165 per coin. It is the 220nd market cap on CMC.
To enter into the top 100 mc's right now, would require a price of $0.070238, or 1.6x.
To enter into the top 50 mc's right now, would require a price of $0.21435, or 5x.
To enter into the top 20 mc's right now, would require a price of $1.62335, or 3
Outside of the initial token sale, I believe the distribution to be as follows:
2.5% for Bonuses/Community Growth.
5% for the Core Team.
1.5% for Bounties.
2% to Advisors.
Total = 11% of supply.
With the beta launching in Q1 — Q2 2018, my guess is you're going to want to grab some of these coins now, while they're cheap. I'm rather bullish on this project, as it flirts with the products of other previous cryptocurrencies, like Gnosis, or Augur, but it has it's own unique qualities, and a feeling of real consideration and effort put into the development of not just the product, but the skills of the people involved.
As always, DYOR.
investFeed Website: https://www.investfeed.com/login
investFeed BTC ANN: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1989821.msg%msg_id%
investFeed Twitter: https://twitter.com/investfeed
investFeed White Paper: https://www.investfeed.com/upload/investFeedInc.TokenSale.pdf
Many moons, safe trading. -Esq
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