The Elevator: My Go-To Investment Apps + 3 Financial Trends
Welcome to The Elevator. I’m David Sherry. I previously founded Death to Stock, and now I partner with a dozen or so entrepreneurs building businesses from $1-$25M+ in revenue. This letter shares the opportunities, trends, and products that help you build your lifestyle and business.
There are 3 trends currently playing out, one after the other.
Financialization
The first is the financialization of everything. We’re making all value liquid, digital, and tradeable. This turns us all into investors, and makes allocating capital more a part of your job if you want to grow your earnings, regardless of the role you’re in.
Fractionalization
The second is the fractionalization of investing, where more long-tail investment products come to market, giving users infinite choices of products, and finally breaking the broad monopoly of broad indexing, swinging allocation back to actively managed niche products. You’ll see some examples of this below in terms of how many apps I use. While Public markets shrink, the total number of products will explode.
Social Finance
The third is social finance, which is what’s emerging next, where products become inherently more social, and social media + finance further overlap in the digital products and games we use.
I’ve long paid attention and been interested in investment trends, today I simply wanted to share my current tech stack for how I like to invest. The apps you see are products of the drivers of the trends listed above.
Here are the apps I use regularly:
Acorns – is an amazing app that allows you to invest your “spare change.” Any time you make a purchase, Acorns will automatically “round-up” that purchase to the nearest dollar by investing the difference into an index fund. My pro-tip is to turn on the 5% BTC allocation as it will help with the overall returns.
Daffy – Daffy is the easiest app for donations I’ve used, especially because it allows for crypto. I also like GoFundMe for donating to individual causes.
M1 – This app let’s you build your portfolios through “Pies” which means you can create any amount of “slices” that are ETFs or individual securities or groups of securities that you want to pair together. I also use M1 for their 5% treasury cash account and also for some retirement accounts. M1 is where monthly direct deposits go for general recurring investments.
Frec – I’m new to this app but after speaking with their team, I think it’s a great solution for tax-loss harvesting through investing. I’m planning on turning it on at some point as a way to continually harvest and re-invest capital gains.
Co-Pilot – This is my favorite budgeting app. I use it on desktop most and rarely touch mobile.
Uniswap – Incredible DEX for swapping cryptos, mind-blowing user experience in it’s simplicity. I’m sure there are better DEX’s but I always love Uniswap.
X – Pretty much the only thing I use X for is very specific market news and I follow a few people in particular that I trust to gut-check market sentiment. Lists help, otherwise I avoid.
Unchained – Great company out of Austin that’s good for longterm BTC cold storage, it’s a Multi-sig account meaning you allow them to be one of your key holders as an institution. Speaking of keys, I use Trezor for hardware wallets.
Rally Rd. – I’ve always loved this company, and I believe over time it will evolve into more of a true “exchange.” Rally let’s you buy fractional shares of high-end art and collectibles. I own pieces of a few cars and sports memorabilia through their platform.
What apps do you use most? Any questions?
Have an amazing rest of the week,
xx David
I’m David Sherry, founder of Death to Stock. I partner with founders & entrepreneurs with growing companies. Helping them define their vision and grow personally and professionally to capture their biggest opportunities.