Apply HN: Wevest – Replicate Trades Experts Make to Increase Success in Stocks

Modern online brokers already have the option to "mirror" another trader's trades (i.e. I say "I want to copy this person" and I make every trade they do, at the same time). How will you compete with these?

What prevents Wevest from being used by trade experts as a way to scam people? It would be like giving these pump and dump people access to your Ameritrade account. They will have 2 accounts. Their real account and their Wevest account. Buy a stock for $1 with real account then use their we vest account to but the same stock. The price will go up. Then sell the stock in the real account.

I can see that there might be demand for this, although I would not recommend this app to my friends so that's a bad sign. I fear that casual people trade stocks for certain reasons - only one of which is to make money. In particular, I think a lot of people trade stocks because they have certain hypotheses about the world / markets and they want to test them out or be able to talk about them. Even people who invest in index funds have strong beliefs about which index funds are best. I guess you can tap into the "which managers are best", kind of, but it doesn't seem as appealing for some reason.

This is an interesting idea - a few questions that come to mind:

How do you plan to acquire your trading data? Public filings? Experts voluntarily sharing their portfolios?

What type of experts do you envision being on your platform? Jim Cramer type CNBC personalities? Hedge fund managers?

etoro?