Trakinvest looks at India to grow its stock gaming business

For those who have little knowledge about stock market trading and investing, getting started is the greatest hurdle. That is the gap that Trakinvest, a Singapore-based company started by Bobby Bhatia, an Indian-born former AIG and JP Morgan executive, looks to fill in.
 

The company has gamified the whole notion of stock market trading.

It is a virtual trading-cum-social platform where users can create a portfolio, follow other traders and can even copy their trading moves on Trakinvest. It provides a real-time trading platform to its users where they can trade using virtual currency. Trakinvest has a freemium model, where registered users pay monthly subscriptions if they want to track other users on the platform.

To start trading, one has to start with $100,000 in virtual cash to begin buying and selling. The company website boasts of $500 million worth of virtual stocks being purchased so far and prizes worth $200,000 won by its users.

For Bhatia, who started visiting B-schools in India as a mentor, the realisation that only a small fraction of those graduating from these management colleges have a real awareness about stock trading, turned out to be quite paradoxical. "That's when I began to think about the idea of Trakinvest, to give the millenials an edge in retail trading," he said.

The two-year old self-funded company caters to various Asian countries and has about 100,000 subscribers, of which about 75 per cent are from India. Hence, it was a natural decision for Bhatia to turn India into one of the key markets of his company.

Of the total subscribers, about 10-15 per cent are active premium users at any point of time on the platform. Bhatia is quite certain that he does not want to portray unrealistic growth figures in terms of subscribers and is happy even if it's only a few hundred thousand but highly active users who are on his platform. According to him, a majority of the users are youngsters and hence there is no question about the potential of the business.

There have been instances where the stock simulating platform also turned out to be a campaigning/branding tool for companies. FWD, a Thailand-based insurance company, managed to bring about 10,000 people for their white-labelled campaign, thanks to the lead generation capacity of Trakinvest.

It is also a hiring platform for companies to recruit brokers who have proved their mettle in trading. So far, about 50 such internships have been awarded by various companies. The FWD association even saw five Trakinvest traders landing up for internships at the company.

While there are a lot of trading training courses offered by various financial institutions in the country, including those offered by the National Stock Exchange, most of them are confined to teaching theory and familiarising jargons rather than providing practical experience in trading.

That's where Trakinvest has taken its level of commitment one step further and is now exploiting the luxury of the virtual trading platform to offer certification programme in trade investing known as GOTC package for $100. Individuals will be trained in basic resources while the interactive trading platform will help them overcome performance hurdles. Towards the end of the training, each student will be given a report of his/her entire trading history as well as the analytical overlay.

"The concentrated track records that are loosely existent at the institutional level are not there at the retail level. So, (often) it is purely a social-based introduction that leads to an account opening. My question was, how do I give retail an edge?", Bhatia says.

The company, which does not divulge details of its financials, however, said it has already break even. Trakinvest is set to launch its Android and iOS apps and towards the end of the year, it plans to add chat options to enhance interactivity.