How Motif helped two 11-year-olds beat Ivy League MBAs in an investing contest (STA BREAKING NEWS and ARCHIVES)

by Theresa , Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 16:07

A little over a year after opening up its thematic investment platform to the public, Motif has seen more than 75,000 individual investment motifs created by its users, co-founder and CEO Hardeep Walia announced today from the Stocktoberfest conference in Coronado.

These motifs, which function like zero fee, low-cost ETFs, center around ideas like “Big Data,” “Bear International Market,” “Buy the Dip,” and “Biotech Breakthrough.” By comparison, it took the company’s team of data scientists and professional investors a similar amount of time to create the first 120 such motifs in the platform’s earliest days. But by relying on the power of the crowd, as well as using social proof and real investing results to rank these strategies, the company has dramatically expanded the universe of accessible investment strategies.

“There’s more motifs today than ETFs and mutual funds combined,” Walia says.

The takeaway, as Walia explained to the room of several hundred traders, financial advisors, technologists, and angel investors, is that investing has never been more accessible.

Walia offered a powerful testament to the democratizing effect of the Motif platform, sharing a story about the surprise winners of a University investing competition sponsored by his company. As he explains, it wasn’t the soon to be MBA grads from a handful of Ivy League schools that created the highest performing motifs under the contest. Rather, it was two 11-year-olds from Fargo, North Dakota, even though the company didn’t know they were participating.

The winners, as part of their 9th grade math class at Oak Grove Lutheran School, were participating in the contest unofficially. But they outperformed their graduate school counterparts by an average of five to six percent, nevertheless.

The result was first identified by an AP reporter who eventually interviewed the teacher and his students, prompting a visit by Walia. Relying on a keen eye for changing consumer behavioral trends around them and a healthy dose of common sense, the winning investors bet on popular brands like Facebook, Under Armour, Netflix, Starbucks, Amazon, Google, and Priceline.com. Walia says that he has since invested into the Oak Grove Motif and “made a lot of money” as a result.

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