Inside The Platform Helping to Invest Like Substack & FinTwit's Top Researchers | Plutus

**Shashank Chiranewala** (0:00)
I think for the first time, we're at a place where talented portfolio builders, managers, researchers have an avenue that is not limited to big banks.
And Plutus fully intends to incubate that talent and grow it. We really looked at it from the customer's lens and said, who is the best content provider for this in terms of alpha that can be generated? And we went through a list and we found the people that we really liked. And I am personally just very ecstatic that I can actually invest in these things now, finally, which wasn't true until a few months ago.

**Max Wiethe** (0:42)
Welcome to Other People's Money. I'm Max Wiethe. And today I'm joined by Shashank Chiranewala, founder of Plutus, a new investment platform that allows you to invest in portfolios developed by independent research providers, many of whom are listeners, probably know from Substack and FinTwit. Shashank, thank you for coming on the show.

**Shashank Chiranewala** (1:03)
Thanks, Max. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Happy to get into this long form chat. I just want to disclaim a way that we're going to be talking about a lot of topics here. So, you know, don't take this as investment advice that's reserved for actual clients. This is just my personal views and more informational in nature.

**Max Wiethe** (1:28)
Yeah, and we'll get into why that disclaimer is important. You are an SEC Registered Investment Advisor, so under all of the compliance rules that that entails. But before we get into the nitty gritty of the platform, I just want to talk about, you know, your journey coming into this, the experience you had consuming independent research, trying to create portfolios for yourself based off of the research you were doing.

**Shashank Chiranewala** (1:54)
Listen, I'm 38 years old. I'm sitting here in beautiful Seattle. I got a couple of bucks to my name.
Let's start there. I want to manage my money in a way that makes sense to me. I have life needs. I have risk reward desires, et cetera, et cetera. Who do I go to or what do I do to make that happen? That's really the genesis of this whole thing and the problem that we're trying to solve. And that's how this whole thing started a little over a year ago. We, me and some of the people on my team had this genuine problem. And that kind of just started this whole thing where like, what are the existing solutions that don't involve me going and buying puts and calls and single name stocks on my own brokerage account? And, you know, that goes about as well as it does.
So, frankly, I looked at everything. I looked at hedge funds where I would even qualify to be an LP, between paying $3.35 on that and being locked to $6.25 max, right? Like basically not being able to withdraw my capital if I wanted to. And other, just, you know, the performance is what it is, and it's very opaque, and these managers have bad quoters and days and months, and then you're just kind of screwed, right?
Starting with that, and then talk to other friends, and they're like, okay, what do you do? And they had their versions of horrible, they start out confident and say, index investing or something like that. But then we find out, you know, that doesn't really do justice to my needs either, which then leads to, okay, so like, what am I gonna do? Walk into an Edward Jones to get financial advice? I don't know. None of those solutions were working for me personally. And so, you're familiar with Cetrini, you're familiar with Shrub, you're familiar with all these amazing researchers that we have on our platform. And really, it's the same context that I'm familiar with them too. I've been a subscriber of a lot of them for a while. I like their work, I like what they do, I like reading it.
Some of them have transparent model portfolios that they were operating even without Plutus. But the problem again was like, how do I then actually invest in something like that, right?

**Max Wiethe** (4:29)
When we talked, you made it very clear that, you know, you are not a copy trading platform.
That has really emerged in the last few years with some people saying, you're never gonna see people our age, you know, millennials and younger going to an investment advisor again. They're not gonna go into an Edward Jones office. They're not gonna go into Merrill or something like that. We're all just gonna copy trade these people. And they've seen tremendous asset growth. And so you've said very clearly, though, that you're not a copy trader. Why do you take that stance?