CEO Post: Are We Trivializing a Serious Matter?
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 5:54PM By Gaspard de Dreuzy
Kapitall has been live for just over three weeks, and even though we’re not actively publicizing our beta too much, we’ve already received a good deal of coverage and user feedback. Most has been really enthusiastic, but some has been a little skeptical. I think both are pretty telling.
First some positive stuff from the media:
In Mashable’s Spark of Genius column, we were called “revolutionary.” Money Under 30 said we do “for investing what the iPhone did for cell phones.” Investment News said “the design should have some real consumer appeal.”
We’ll take the praise of course, but the skepticism may be even more revealing:
In CBS Moneywatch, Allan Roth said, “gaming is a lot of fun” and “they’ve definitely got the fun thing down.” But he also went on to say that “in theory it makes all kinds of sense to try and tap into the universal experience of the next generation of techie investors coming up. […] But it teaches short-term speculation rather than investing.”
When we set out to build Kapitall, we expected to hear concerns that we were trivializing a serious matter. But are we? We set out to make investing more inclusive by leveraging game mechanics; Kapitall uses this approach to help users build successful and appropriate portfolios, not to become stock pickers. We emphatically did not set out to influence where or why anyone should invest. There are plenty of voices doing that already.
On Kapitall, you will be able invest not only in stocks but also in mutual funds and ETFs. You can choose the strategy – which in many cases will be “buy and hold.” And with Kapitall, as opposed to other online brokers, you will always be able to invest in practice portfolios – no real money required.
In fact, we believe that giving more people the tools to grow their investing knowledge in a fun, low stakes environment is a good thing. Whether they choose to become self-directed investors or simply take a more active role in working with their advisors, more knowledge and confidence can only help.
I’ll leave you with an interesting comment from a beta tester. We’d love to hear what you think too!
I consider this project a very worthy tool to fix a very real problem: under-interested and under-educated investors (in my opinion, a pretty high perecentage of the 18 - 35 year old market). You might not have created the next lightning-fast trading platform, but from where I sit you made a great tool for what i believe is your intended audience...people who should start investing and learning about investing.
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