A Quick Review
In our last update, I had shared several points of good news:

• Clients who had shuttered their wallets due to Covid were beginning to start spending again.
• We were getting some great exposure by once again being a Judge at the Benzinga Fintech Awards. 
• We had completed an overhaul of how images are handled on our site. This greatly increased the overall speed of the site, and enabled us to now handle the latest generation of image extensions.
• We introduced new functionality to create dynamic and interactive features for discussion. Users now have the ability to reply to discussion threads with pictures, stock charts, memes, animated gifs, hyperlinks, embedded videos, emojis, and more.  This is on top of the existing functionality we already had - social tagging, hashtags, cash tags, etc.

But most importantly, I shared with you the exciting information that we were close to finalizing a deal with a VC, but cautioned that VCs move slowly and that until we had a deal signed, anything could happen and that we were under a gag order not to discuss the situation.   

A New VC Investment
I'm thrilled to say that though it took far longer than we had expected, we did finalize an agreement with the VC and now have a signed agreement in place. The relationship is a bit unusual, but is one which I think will benefit us far more in the long run...

This particular venture capital firm only invests in late stage companies, which obviously TalkMarkets is not.  But they were extremely impressed with all we've accomplished and believe we have the potential to go far.  So we came up with an agreement where the owner of the VC personally invested in us and he's also committed to raising significantly more through his personal network.  As we use this new found capital to grow, this VC will then be in a position to invest significantly more later on (they typically invest $5-$10 million in companies that show significant growth). Having this commitment and the support of a major player will help make raising funds far easier as well. With these additional funds, they've also identified growth opportunities which they want us to pursue (more on that below). 

A Major Expansion
TalkMarkets has always featured expert stock ideas from some of the leading minds in the investment world.  But as we've learned from research we've recently completed, new investors are flooding into the stock market in record numbers never seen before.  Many want to get in early on the "next big stock idea" and are turning to groups like Wall Street Bets on Reddit which now boasts over 11 million members, You've likely read about Wall Street Bets in the news and how they managed to overpower major hedge funds and caused GameStop stock to skyrocket in value. 

However, groups like Wall Street Bets, and platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin aren't designed for the financial industry.  They lack various safeguards, financial integration and tools that investors need to properly discuss and trade stocks.  Also, many of these sites, especially Reddit, have an outdated interface that is a turn off to both new and experienced investors alike.  Most importantly, they want to filter out the noise to identify the "good stock" ideas from the millions of posts on sites like Wall Street Bets, so they don't miss out.  At the same time, they want to better amplify their own ideas to galvanize others to follow their lead and cause their prefered stocks to rise.  None of these current sites are able to do that effectively.  But with our contributors who are major influencers, the reach provided by our distribution partners, and with the launch of TalkMarkets.TV (more on that later), we are uniquely suited to amplifying the best stock ideas. And since we have an editorial team and expert authors, we are also better at identifying the best ideas and giving them more exposure.

The VC would like us to capitalize on the current situation by creating an integrated platform for users to share their stock ideas, but with full financial integration and features and with a more modern interface.  We hosted a professional focus group and found that users universally liked this idea very much.  We've dubbed this new section "TradeMob."

So now, we'll have TalkMarkets feature expert generated content, and TradeMob feature user generated content.  But they will be on the same platform so we can leverage the two to drive traffic to each other.  For example, if a user is reading an expert's article on TalkMarkets about GameStop, they'll also be shown what regular retail investors think of the stock on TradeMob.  And if a user is reading a stock idea about GameStop on the TradeMob forum, they'll easily be able to also see what the experts think.  This will help drive traffic from one side of our site, to the other, increasing traffic to both in a form of cross pollination.   But it gets even better...

Innovative Structure That Benefits You

We structured the deal in a way that will radically help our existing investors and equity holding contributors in TalkMarkets.  Rather than simply investing in TalkMarkets directly, diluting our current investors, they instead had us create a new subsidiary to TalkMarkets, called TradeMob. This will have the dual benefit of giving new investors the opportunity to invest in a brand new company, at the ground floor, rather than an existing company with a far higher valuation. At the same time, these new investors won't take any equity away from TalkMarkets investors.  Yet, since TalkMarkets is a significant investor in and majority stakeholder in TradeMob, our existing investors will still benefit from any success TradeMob has and benefits from the increased valuation of TalkMarkets directly.  And of course, since it will all be on the same platform, any new user that lands on one section of the site, will automatically be registered for both which will further TalkMarkets' own growth.  

Being a subsidiary also creates the added benefit of increasing the likelihood of an acquisition. It means a company could acquire either TradeMob or TalkMarkets together, or separately. That means we'll have broader appeal since some companies may only be interested in one side over the other. Meanwhile, TradeMob can leverage TalkMarkets' existing content, partners, users, and contributors  to give the platform a huge jumpstart. This is an unparalleled advantage over other startups which are also trying to cash in on the current trend, but are starting from nothing.