While many kids grow up wanting to be an athlete, a singer or an astronaut, PortfolioMeta founder and CEO Michael Rouse has always been interested in investing. The Milwaukee native launched last month his own investing platform that aims to provide a wealth of data and insights to the average investor. “I’ve honestly always been
While many kids grow up wanting to be an athlete, a singer or an astronaut, PortfolioMeta founder and CEO Michael Rouse has always been interested in investing. The Milwaukee native launched last month his own investing platform that aims to provide a wealth of data and insights to the average investor.
“I’ve honestly always been really interested in the stock market going back to like fifth grade. I’d always say I wanted to be a stockbroker or trader. It just really appealed to me… the fast pace of it,” Rouse said.
He started learning how to code in high school. While he took a break to enlist in the Army in 2017, deploying to Afghanistan 2019, he ended up continuing his education at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, where he earned a degree in computer science. While studying at school he noticed a disconnect between the products available to Wall Street professionals and the products available to retail investors.
“Naturally, I think there’s a huge intersect between technology and finance and there’s a lot of opportunities in the area. Out of all the industries out there, the financial industry has probably lagged behind with the adoption of technology more so than any other industry,” Rouse said.
He believes that lack of adoption of new technologies isn’t happening for leaders within the financial industry, but more so for common investors. This led Rouse on a journey to close the gap between the tools available to the Wall Street elite and an average investor. He had the idea to create a platform allowing investors to track their stocks, ETFs, options and crypto all in one place – while also providing live market insights and portfolio tracking – last August. PortfolioMeta is not a platform used for making trades, but rather gaining useful insights. The first full release of the platform happened this July. Since then, it has attracted over registered 1,000 users.
“Our goal is to provide everyone with access to the best possible tools available for investing. We want to be the Bloomberg Terminal for the 99%. More useful than Bloomberg for 99% of stock and crypto investors, while being more affordable than a Netflix subscription is our mission,” Rouse said.
[caption id="attachment_554093" align="alignleft" width="300"] Charlie Terrill, co-founder of PortfolioMeta.[/caption]
PortfolioMeta is currently free to subscribers, but the platform will eventually be moved to a subscription model. Rouse expects the price to be around $8 a month. He has been bootstrapping since starting to build his platform last summer but is in the middle of fundraising for a seed round.
Right now, Rouse and his co-founder, Charlie Terrill, are focused on retail customers and growing their base of registered users. In the future, he sees the company having the possibility of partnering up with banking and investment organizations.
“We provide more analytics about your portfolio… a more complete portfolio breakdown than anyone else in the industry by far,” Rouse said. “I think we’ll really change the industry, honestly.”
