Catching up on my reading this week and came across @captain 's stock newsletter which lead me to @tdozzi 's newsletter where he discusses Titan which is a newish fintech startup that aims to democratize investing by bringing the "hedge fund experience" to your average investor (read: not wealthy enough to invest in a traditional hedge fund).

I decided to give Titan a try and share my experience since I think a lot of others on Commonstock may be interested.

First off, Titan is a tough name to search for and there are plenty of investment related companies named Titan out there already so I had trouble finding the company's site.

Here's a direct link: titan.com (duh, I don't know why but I assumed they would not own titan dot com, they also use titanvest.com)

Perhaps the other reason why Titan's site is hard to find? It's not really their flagship product, you'll do most everything via their app. There's good reason for this since they communicate with you on a regular basis regarding what their investing in and what they're thinking about which so far has been really great.

At this time Titan charges $5/month for balances <$10k and 1% of AUM for balances over $10k. From what I can tell so far there are no other hidden fees.

Right now Titan offers four funds:

The stated goal of Titan investments is to achieve 15% annual growth resulting in a doubling of your funds every 5 years.

Getting started is about what you'd expect if you've ever signed up for a brokerage before. All the typical KYC questions but it goes pretty quickly and smoothly in the app. After you get done with that you're dropped into the app while you wait for your first funds to transfer. There's a really well done video series where the founder walks you through what to expect and some of the key parts of the app. Aside from the part explaining their fund offerings being out of date (it didn't mention their two newest funds) this was a better experience than I expected. Each video is bite sized and just on a single topic or screen and you can click arrows at the bottom to skip to the next one at any time.

One issue I had is that there is supposed to be a way to see step by step the progress of your deposits as they go from your bank to Titan and for my initial deposit none of that showed up so I was left wondering if it was actually in progress or not. I reached out to customer support (detailed below) and they instructed me to log out and back into the app and since then it's been working fine for other deposits.

Live chat is integrated into the app and is called "Investor Relations". At first I didn't realize this was just a fancy way of saying "help desk" and couldn't find a place to get help. It takes 10-20hrs to typically get a response with followups coming a bit faster after an hour or two typically. This isn't amazing but honestly my expectations for response from all customer service has fallen a lot in the last year. It seems like every business is either overwhelmed by questions, understaffed or both and Titan is no exception. That said, the responses were useful and my questions weren't urgent.

As someone who's never had the true "hedge fund experience" I don't know what I might be missing (a lot more smalltalk about golf?). The frequent posts about what Titan's analysts are thinking about the market, what trades they are making in each of their funds and the transparency of getting updates in exactly which stocks / crypto I'm invested in is really refreshing. This level of transparency and the app/site that enables it really does feel like an experience that once you have it you'll never want to go back to the "old way" of doing things again. And I think that is perhaps the most important thing about Titan: if it can grow its user base it will create a whole bunch of people who will expect a lot more from financial service companies. In other words, if Titan even modestly succeeds then I think there will be an onus on Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab, Betterment, Wealthfront, etc to step up their game. Kinda like how Robinhood helped usher in the era of no fee trading. I'm pretty excited about Titan and I hope they really take off and push the whole industry to be better.

Currently I'm in the process of working with their "IRA Concierge" to discuss moving some retirement accounts over. I'm interested in understanding that experience as much as I am interested in actually moving my retirement accounts but I'm definitely open to hearing exactly how it all might work and the benefits for me.

Beyond that their challenge will of course be outperforming the market and weathering any downturns since they've only ever existed in a bull market (even if they did deal with some major corrections). If they can prove that they can outperform and at least meet their 15%/yr goal then coupled with their app-first experience I think they are going to be an absolute rocket ship both as a company and for their clients.