Perth-based finance startup aims to make picking stocks simple as a picture

Perth-based finance startup Simply Wall St is looking to open up the stock market to a host of new investors.

Simply Wall St’s web app provides investors with a checklist for investing, stock ideas and suggestions, helping individuals research and make decisions when investing.

It’s aimed at first time investors, but co-founder Nick van den Berg says its features could appeal to more experienced investors too.

Simply Wall St’s “flagship feature” is called Snowflake, a graphical interpretation of live stock data, which aims to give insight into the most relevant aspects of an investment at a glance.

It’s relying on the Snowflake feature to distance itself from competitors like Stocklight and Stockspot, in a fairly crowded space.

Van den Berg says most offerings tend to fall into the “by investors, for investors” category.

“We’re doing all the calculations that a professional investor would be doing, but rather than presenting it in a standard format, we wanted to make it easy and understandable,” van den Berg says of Snowflake.

“The idea is someone who may never have invested in the stock market before, and doesn’t understand anything about it, they can read through our app and understand the concepts behind it. Rather than using acronyms.

“If you don’t know these concepts, you’ll be able to access this information and understand it.”

Simply Wall St is one of the four startups that were chosen by AWI Ventures to participate in its Fintech accelerator program. It received $100,000 in seed funding through the program.

Van den Berg is working on the startup out of Perth in order to continue to build various business relationships, while co-founder Al Bentley has moved to Sydney to take part in the program.

“AWI loved the way we are visualising data and opening up stock investing to a larger part of the population,” Bentley says.

Simply Wall St is in a private beta, but the team is hoping to open a public beta later this month.

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