DALLAS, TX / ACCESSWIRE / March 8, 2021 / Community - Merriam-Webster defines the word "community" as a "unified body of individuals with a common interest." In reality, a community is so much more than just a mere sum of its constituent parts. And this is especially true for the community at Focus Group Equities, a Dallas-based financial consulting and asset management start-up, where the term "community" takes on a whole new meaning. The community often isn't the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of stocks or trading, but surprisingly, a good community is more often than not the difference between a successful trader and an unsuccessful one.
Focus Group Equities co-founders (from left to right): Varun Muthu, Shubh Sharma, Andy Trinh, Vishok Jonnalagadda.
The company prides itself on its highly active, supportive, integrated, and especially successful community. With more than 3,000 active and satisfied members across all platforms, multiple expert financial analysts, and a diverse executive team dedicated towards engagement and education, coming from some of the most elite universities in the country, it's easy to see why.
Here is a behind-the-scenes look at their Ai indicator that is currently tracking the SPY 500 ETF on March 7th.
One of the setbacks that the company actually leveraged to catalyze its formation was, surprisingly, the COVID-19 pandemic. The onset of the pandemic saw marked fluctuations in the stock market, not to mention an astonishing increase in new investors. The popular investing app "Robinhood" saw revenue increase by a margin of almost 300% that of the preceding month in March 2020, while the brokerage TD Ameritrade saw a record increase of 608,000 new funded accounts within the first quarter of 2020. While all this was excellent for investing platforms and brokerages, the upswing could be attributed to the millions of Americans left unemployed in the devastating wake of the pandemic, desperate for any means available in order to provide for themselves and their families. Unfortunately for many, however, upwards of 95% of all traders fail or lose money in the long run. Varun wasn't about to let any of the new investors he could reach meet the same fate.
Here is a behind-the-scenes look at their Ai indicator that is currently tracking the price of Bitcoin on March 7th.
"Options trading has historically been gatekept by an overabundance of misleading information and an illusion of complexity. People think it's too hard, or too risky, so they're not willing to even give it a shot and they miss out on making some serious money", says FGE co-founder, Varun Muthu. A current undergraduate at the University of Houston, Varun made it his mission to clear the fog and make options trading more accessible to hopeful investors that led to the establishment of Focus Group Equities, originally under the name of "Options Focus Group." Evidently, even from the beginning, the concept of community was essential to Varun.
While FGE may have started out as an options-trading-focused platform, as new members joined, it didn't stay that way. The problems associated with options trading - that it can be challenging for new investors and requires a prominent amount of time, attention, and effort - made it incompatible for members with family duties or with day jobs who couldn't closely monitor their trades.
"We want to know everything we can do to meet our member's needs. We're a community at FGE and if something isn't working for someone, then we're going to do everything in our power to make it right", says Shubh Sharma, co-founder, and fund analyst as well as a neuroscience honors student at The University of Texas in Austin.
Shubh came up with the idea of Stocks Focus Group, a branch of FGE created with the sole intention of providing low stakes and low effort swing-trades to beginner investors who don't have the time or experience for options trading. The weekly watchlists that you receive as a member of SFG detail everything from entry prices, various profit targets for varying levels of risk, and even stop-loss exit prices, simplifying a typically complicated and stressful process into extremely easy to follow and specific instructions, ensuring success for even the most novice of traders. The group has been rocking with an 88% success rate across all trade recommendations and watchlists, making it harder to fail than it is to succeed as a member.
To further support their mission of increasing trading accessibility and teaching new investors how to use their money, the technical team at FGE - composed of coders from Ivy League Universities - has designed a Focus Group Equities Artificial Intelligence Algorithm. "We put many hours into fine-tuning a system which aggregated loads of information into a comprehensible interface", says Vishok Jonnalagadda, co-founder and head of research and development studying computer science at Cornell University. Working alongside Vishok is Andy Trinh, an Economics student at Dartmouth College, who manages much of the user-interaction and Discord integration to this system. Together, they have made a bold step in the world of investing, not only due to its remarkably intuitive and user-friendly design but also because of the accessibility of state-of-the-art high-performance trading algorithms through the TradingView API. It is this attention to detail that has garnered the confidence and support of hundreds of traders, simplifying the seemingly advanced process of technical analysis into an effortless activity within reach of the everyday user. A full series of educational and instructional videos are prepared on youtube for anyone ready to take charge of their own wealth using the algo.
Of course, that's not all there is to FGE. "If we're a community first, then we're a classroom second", says head of education and social outreach Tarush Verma, a current undergraduate at Rice University.
"So many upcoming investing services set their members up for failure by only selling weekly tickers to look out for. Members become over-reliant on having trades spoonfed to them, even if they don't work. That's not what FGE was ever about."
To support the multiple communities within FGE, the team spent months designing a fully-fledged educational course, free to members and non-members alike, published on YouTube. The course covers everything from how to set up an account on TradingView all the way to advanced options trading strategies. To engage further with members, the executive team hosts weekly webinars to discuss techniques, answer questions, and make sure the group is on track in their trading journey, and expert traders like Aswath Suresh and Ojas Gandhi work behind the scenes to ensure this on a personal level.
FGE is still growing. The company has branched out to asset management in recent months, where they develop, implement, and employ quantitative derivative trading strategies based on the Black-Scholes model. If that's not enough, the company is recognized as an analyzer and distributor of dark pool order flow data in order to understand unusual activity in the market. Varun reassures prospective members shouldn't worry too much however about these seemingly complex advancements the company is undertaking taking.
"We're successful because we're a community. We look out for our own. No matter what happens, that's not gonna change."
Contact:
Focus Group Equities
Tarush Verma
[email protected]
Fgequities.com
SOURCE: Focus Group Equities LLC