Share Navigator is an Irish Fintech startup that teaches people how to invest in the stock markets and understand the risks.
Stephen Cox is a registered stockbroker with an MBA in finance and is the founder of Share Navigator, based in DCU’s Invent building. His business teaches people how to make their investments “go the extra mile” with real-time ‘practice investing’ in the financial markets.
What was the initial concept of Share Navigator, and what’s the endgame?
Share Navigator was initially set up to teach people how to invest sensibly in equities, and to show them how to use options as a way of managing risk. As the business evolves, we are adding a low-cost online brokerage service.
The kickstart
The big challenge for any startup is finding finance and capital to grow the business, and big marketing budgets are not a reality at this stage.
We have to be smart about how to move forward, so we will continue to build our user base with education, and then add the online brokerage service. We also have other projects that we are working on, which involve insurance policies for investors on their stock positions.
“We’re developing software to remove all the terminology and jargon.”
Before you start, you should understand the risks
Very few people understand what risk looks like when they’re investing.
We see a lot of people come through our doors labelling themselves as a low-risk investor, and when you take a look at their portfolio, they may only have three stocks in it – with half a million in those three stocks. This is typical. People don’t understand the concept of risk management, and this is the kind of behaviour people are reverting to, even after the economic crash. What we say in our training is that diversification works and investing in just one or two stocks
