So ... who wants to be a billionaire?

BitDepth#1155

MARK LYNDERSAY

SHELDON O POWELL wants you to make money as an investor.

He brings impressive credentials to the task.

At 13, Powell was a mechanic in Jamaica, but his early aptitude with finances placed him in the top ten of a stock wizard competition.

“I want to be the leader of that movement,” he said last week at a meeting at the Hyatt Regency, “I want to take financial technology to the region.”

In 2017, at 30, he won the Best Portfolio Management App award from Capital Finance International, a competition he was nominated to by the World Bank Group.

These are impressive imprimaturs for the project, just as they were when the Powells, father Winston and son Shedon, introduced it almost exactly a year ago.

The app, available on the Google Play Store and for iOS is, primarily, a coaching tool. It uses publicly available records of the top 15 billionaire investors in the world and shows what their portfolios are doing in real time.

“It is not an investment app,” Powell said, “it is a guide, an educational app. As an educational tool, it will teach you so much.

“Users are now empowered to challenge a CFA expert, broker, financial adviser, portfolio manager, market analyst or a pension planner.”

So what’s happened since then?

Both app stores carry the app and a simulator, which sets you up with US$10,000 in virtual money to try its functions and the live app, which requires a payment of US$6.99 monthly to begin trading after a seven-day trial.

The app has more than 1,000 installs on the Google Play Store with 11 reviews. The simulator version of the app has just five installs there.

In addition for the portfolio monitoring, the app also taps into information and reporting from Forbes as a data feed partner displaying its Investing & Finance, Politics, Sports and Business news.

The Powells are articulate and knowledgeable about their project, but with any tool that manages investment money, any curiosities are worth noting.

The company is based in three Caribbean islands. It operates in Jamaica to enable online financial payments, in the Bahamas as “leverage for US-based institutional investors,” and administratively from Trinidad and Tobago.

The company’s website (thebillionairesleagueapp.com) has no contact information links and most links simply bounce you to the top of the site’s page. The most clearly usable link, “Get App,” gathers contact information before allowing access to the software.

I took a card from Winston Powell for follow-up questions for this story. When I took it out of my wallet, the ink on the slickly produced stationery had stuck to the leather, peeling off.

The contact e-mail on the card for Sheldon Powell did not work, bouncing back. I eventually posed my questions via Facebook Messenger. The e-mailed response came from a GMail account.

Add in young Powell’s predilection for dressing up or down to suit his audience and his insistence that last week’s meeting was a gathering of friends, and not merely the discussion of a digital product or a business proposition and you get flags, not red but a flutter of yellow.

At the start of last week’s meeting Sheldon Powell felt moved to declare, “There’s a lot of network marketing happening in the world, this is not that, this app is a financial tool.”

If he knew that he had to confirm that, then he should know that these tiny components of the project, all likely to be just early, minor but untidy glitches, need to be sorted out to ensure that the project is clearly what it’s advertised to be.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there