Hi everyone,
I’m writing this up fairly quickly to put the company on your radar. Please excuse any typos or errors.
We’ve been following the Robinhood issues closely and you’ve seen David’s coverage on IPOE/SoFi. As a site that has recommended crypto in the past (LINK and BTC), and as two investors who have owned and traded crypto for a few years, we know all too well the issues around Coinbase. The commissions are exorbitant and it always feels like you’re a bit cheated.
Therefore, when we saw Voyager Digital’s forward guidance raised over 200%+ (source: Ycharts) due to the exodus of crypto enthusiasts from Robinhood, it piqued our interest. Voyager Digital is commission-free because it uses the interest it makes to offset commissions. The company is also offering up to 9% APR for stable coins.
We don’t see any apparent issues with the management. The Founder is Steve Ehrlich, who founded Lightspeed Financial and was the previous CEO of E-Trade Professional Trading arm before it was bought out by Lightspeed. Oscar Salazar is a Co-founder and he was early in Uber as the CTO. The one issue that I do see is they are involved in another company called Pager, which is a digital health startup. I prefer a founding team that has only one focus.
Voyager will likely make for a strong Q1 momentum stock due to the number of signups the company is getting. We can’t guarantee that but the momentum in the audience is certainly there. Hopefully, price action will match as we go along.
Here are some stats:
- Voyager went from $200 million AUM in December to $500 million AUM in January. We think this number will be much higher as the signups continue.
- The company announced a record 250,000 downloads during a three-day period.
- Per the same press release, the app reached #18 on the app store (similar to Pinterest). The company processed over 1M trades in January compared to 200K in December
As of December 2019, Voyager offers FDIC insurance on USD.
We fully expect this to be roller coaster ride similar to Bitcoin and Chainlink. Please consider that Knox is extremely talented here in reducing risk in these high-risk assets. Voyager is not a crypto (it offers a token but we are only interested in the stock at this time). Despite the Voyager Digital stock not being a crypto, we do expect there to be volatility and correlation with crypto price action.
In order to get this blog post out, I’m cutting it off here but will follow up with a more detailed analysis soon. To be clear, the reason we are moving quickly on this is because we have been crypto investors for some time and we know the pain points around using Coinbase and the other sites (either they don’t offer the lesser-known tokens or they charge high commissions).
We’ve openly criticized Robinhood and it’s because we know the issues around this platform. They’ve promised many things to retailers (we consider ourselves retailers, of course) and failed to deliver. This really isn’t acceptable to us as our hard-earned money and financial futures deserve better. Therefore, we think many likeminded crypto holders will be attracted to Voyager Digital as they offer commission-free crypto trades on a wide variety of crypto. Our BTC and LINK is held in Coinbase bc Robinhood was too high-risk, in our opinion. We’ve paid exorbitant commissions here to avoid high-risk Robinhood … so let’s see if Voyager can solve these pain points for crypto and blockchain investors who want a good value (like us!)