‘Atom Finance’ Founder Eric Shoykhet — Building For the Retail Investor and Debating PFOF

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On today’s episode, I sat down with Eric Shoykhet, Founder & CEO of Atom Finance and a proud Wharton alum.

Atom Finance is an awesome company building the “Bloomberg Terminal” for the retail investor and prosumer. Atom is fastest-growing investment research & portfolio management platform, backed by the likes of Greycroft, General Catalyst, and Flatiron Health’s Zach Weinberg. Their DAU has grown over 300% since the pandemic!

While working on Wall Street, Eric identified the massive information gap between enterprise platforms like CapIQ, and what was available to retail investors. Atom Finance was founded in 2018 to close this gap, empowering any investor with the tools typically reserved for Wall Street professionals.

I took a look through the product —I really liked its sleek interface and variety of features. Atom did a great job balancing simplicity and elementary features to not overwhelm new users, with really strong advanced features that you can find here.

One pro feature that I found interesting is the “Fund Look Through” analysis, where Atom looks at the underlying stocks you own within a mutual fund or ETF, and treats them as their own securities in your portfolio. So if you own let’s say a lot of Apple and then also own FTEC/an S&P 500 tracer, you probably own a lot more Apple than you realize.

Here’s a sample portfolio scraped from Google:

I’m a long-time user of the traditional brokerages and have plenty of fintech apps, but this interface is as sleek and detailed as it gets. I highly suggest you at least get the free version to play around with and utilize the ability to get analyst forecasts.

The Atom discussion lasts the first ~15 minutes of the episode, with the last 15 minutes dedicated to Robinhood, PFOF, retail investing, Public.com’s tipping model, and the democratization of finance. He was also recently published in NASDAQ discussing similar themes here. It’s a great read.

I can’t do Eric’s answers justice here in writing, but he provides some fantastic points that run a bit contrarian to the current narrative around retail investing and PFOF. Jump in at 14:30 to hear his takes, especially given his background and the company that he leads. I found myself listening to his answers a few times during the editing process.

Episode breakdown below:
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• 3:13 — His journey from Wharton to one of the top groups on Wall Street, to investing, to starting his own venture
• 6:55 — Atom Finance and its key features to equip retail investors with better information
• 10:40 — How Eric thinks about building products for the many different types of investors
• 12:50 — Their “freemium” model
• 14:30 — The start of a 10-minute discussion on Robinhood, the dark side of PFOF, retail trader psychology, and its implications for his users
• 25:08 — His thoughts on Public.com’s tipping model
• 27:00 — A rapid, rapid-fire question round

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Ryan Zauk is an MBA Candidate at The Wharton School, where he runs the Wharton FinTech Podcast. He currently works with the US International Development Finance Corp looking at technology impact investments in developing markets. He has a passion for music, media, and all things FinTech.

You can reach him at rzauk@wharton.upenn.edu or on Twitter.