Social Investing

Yo! It’s been a minute.

It’s clear skies 「快晴」 over here in Steveston where I’m chillin’ at Sanctuary Cafe.

Today’s product thought, making DIY investment platforms more social, more sticky.

I’ve been a Questrade user for years and I’d call myself a pretty passive investor — over 95% of my holdings sit in one broad index ETF (XEQT).

Why XEQT over the other ‘EQT’ funds?

Because a great man once told me, “X Gon’ Give It To Ya”.

(Full disclosure: my actual investing lives on Questrade — Wealthsimple is where I do my taxes.)

The more time I spend on these platforms, the more obvious it is that they’re leaving a huge amount of user data on the table by treating the app as a pure transaction layer instead of a place people actually want to open every day.

I’d love to know what other users on the platform are buying and why. Right now, X is the only place where I go to see like-minded investors post positions, screenshot returns, and so on. Why isn’t this stuff in any of my platforms?!

eToro built an entire product, CopyTrader, around letting users follow and mirror top-performing investors, and it’s a core reason the platform is sticky. Blossom lets Canadians share and compare portfolios socially. These guys have shown that the demand is there. So I find it a bit surprising why neither Questrade nor Wealthsimple have bothered to build it natively, even though they’re the ones who actually hold the data.

I work in consumer software and the pattern there is clear: apps with a social layer are stickier than apps without one, because people come back for the people (duh), not just the features.

The Canadian brokerages have skipped this. And I think I know one of the reasons why.

Once you’ve got a meaningful portfolio parked somewhere, moving it to another platform is a hassle. Platforms like Questrade and Wealthsimple get away with being sticky by default, without ever building the social features that consumer apps have had to fight for.

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

— Andy Grove

That’s exactly why there’s so much unrealized upside sitting here.

Here’s what I’d like. Let me see other TFSA investors, other RRSP investors, other users generally, and let me track their portfolios over time. I think of myself as fairly disciplined, but I’d absolutely want a low-effort way to see how a passive index approach stacks up against what everyone else is doing.

The mechanics don’t need to be complicated: rolling returns over 6 and 12 months, opt-in visibility, maybe segmented by account type. Nothing complex.

The obvious pushback is privacy, but speaking for myself, I don’t care if people see what I hold or what I’m buying — I already share my own investing activity publicly on my own website, and I’d be OK sharing it on Questrade too. And I’m clearly not alone: people already share their portfolios, trades, and returns openly on YouTube, X, and elsewhere without a second thought. If users are this comfortable broadcasting their positions on social media, an opt-in leaderboard inside the app they already trust with their money is a much smaller ask, not a bigger one.

The demand for social investing content is there. It’s everywhere except on the platforms that actually hold the money. Closing that gap, even with something as simple as an opt-in leaderboard, is an obvious growth lever that Questrade and Wealthsimple have left completely on the table.