When Steven Wang was in second grade, he convinced his parents to open a custodial stock account. Now 23 years old, he’s running “dub,” a copy-trading platform aimed at solving the financial-literacy gap among his peers.
A recent Harris Poll survey commissioned by dub highlights the contradiction: while 60% of Gen Z and 66% of millennials are investing in the stock market outside of their 401(k)s, just 17% of Americans feel “very confident” in their understanding of how markets actually work. Most believe investing, rather than a traditional 9-to-5 career, offers the fastest path to wealth—a dream increasingly shaped by viral TikTok finance videos or meme-stock success stories rather than grounded investment knowledge, Wang told Fortune.
Copy trading, the concept underpinning dub, allows everyday investors to automatically replicate the trades of more skilled market participants in real-time. Instead of picking their own stocks, users can select vetted traders, hedge-fund veterans, and other experienced investors to follow. Whenever those investors make a move, the same trade is executed in the user’s account, mirroring strategies and outcomes.
“The ultra-wealthy are already betting on smart people to deploy their capital,” Wang told Fortune. “We’re bringing that experience to regular Americans.”
Wang grew up 20 minutes outside Detroit, the child of poor Asian immigrants who both worked in the auto industry. He watched the city’s decline after the Great Financial Crisis and the auto industry’s blows to blue-collar families, an experience that shaped his desire to build a more stable financial future for himself.
A self-described “hustler,” Wang sold Pokémon cards on the playground and flipped Air Jordans in grade school. Growing up, he nerded out on Warren Buffett books and Howard Marks memos, fueled by a self-professed “childish” vision to get rich through stock-market investments.
“I really learned the hard way,” Wang said. “I’m competing against hundreds of thousands of people on Wall Street trading for a living… [who] have decades of investing experience over me.”
By the pandemic, he was day trading from his Harvard dorm room—watching waves of new investors enter the market and lose big to “hype, misinformation, and bad timing.” Wang said that’s when he decided the tools of professional investors should be accessible to everyone.
dub is built to merge the accessibility of social media with the discipline of professional investing, Wang said. Users browse creators’ portfolios, analyze performance metrics, and choose investors to copy, with trades executed automatically in their own accounts. Creators are vetted, regulated, and compensated through royalties when others follow their portfolios—aligning incentives toward consistent performance rather than one-off meme stocks.
Wang doesn’t avoid the paradox of dub—the company leverages the power of influencers, but also tries to build a layer of trust and accountability, he said.
“Every portfolio on dub has a transparent track record,” Wang said. “You can see exactly how each creator has performed over time. This isn’t about hype or going viral, it’s about verified results.”
Still, the platform operates in a market dominated by what Wang calls “FinTok”—financial influencers on TikTok and Instagram reels whose bite-size videos have become a primary source of investment advice for 62% of Gen Z, according to the Harris Poll survey. Wang understands the appeal: “Creators on TikTok can probably communicate better with my generation than any stodgy financial advisor can.” But he warns that social media’s lack of accountability can be dangerous.
“If someone’s wrong on social media, they just delete the video and move on,” he said.
A resurgence in meme stocks—shares pumped by online communities and detached from fundamentals—reflects a generation with both the desire to make money quickly and a reluctance to put in the harder, slower work real investing requires.
Wang insists dub is not about replicating that behavior under another name. The difference, he says, is a platform with regulated, vetted professionals, transparent performance data, and trade rationales written directly in the app. Users get more than a button to copy trades—they also see the thinking behind them.
“dub’s not a substitute for deeper learning,” Wang admits, but it aims to make the process less intimidating while promoting gradual understanding.
Wang took steps to build trust with users from the moment he conceived of the app, and dub spent over two years working with the SEC and FINRA before launch, registering as a broker-dealer and investment adviser, and ensuring accounts come with standard investor protections, he said.
Wang believes in the markets as “the greatest wealth generator in the world,” but wants his generation to approach them with more even caution than he had as a new investor in the past.
“That’s the gap dub is trying to close,” Wang said. “We’re here to build trust, not trends.”
