Titan Invest: Why you should consider creating an account today

Titan Invest is a company that jumped into the roboadvisor offering world albeit with a slightly different twist than what most consider to be a typical roboadvisor offering. I joined Titan Invest in 2020 mostly out of curiosity. I’m a bit of a stock market junkie and found the clean design, marketing and details of the offering to be quite intriguing. Ok, let’s create an account and throw in a couple hundred bucks and get the lay of the land. Well, six months later, I’m throwing in a few hundred bucks every couple weeks on auto-pay and can’t get enough of the service, the app and the communication that the company sends out to its members/investors.

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What is Titan Invest?

Titan is an investment management service in which individuals can deposit money into set portfolios as designed by the team at Titan. They have two main portfolio options currently. The first is called Flagship and the second is called Opportunities. Flagship is in major companies and aims to outperform the S&P 500. Opportunities invests in smaller cap companies and aims to outperform the Russell 2000. Note that allocating funds into the Opportunities portfolio requires an overall account balance of at least $10,000. So, if you’re a young investor who is just starting out, you are likely looking at the Flagship portfolio.

The uniqueness of Titan comes in that its a “new” company designed to target the younger, digitally-competent generation of investors. Just about all of your interaction with Titan is done through the Titan app on your mobile phone. This includes account creation, checking the account balance, transferring funds, setting up auto-deposits and more. 

Titan also leverages technology in its communication and marketing much more than traditional brokerages. For instance, the handsome Co-Founder and Co-CEO Clayton Gardner will often appear on videos giving either portfolio updates or insights into why Titan may have chosen to invest in a particular stock. While the information communicated in the videos isn’t overly detailed, it’s still incredible marketing and probably highly effective for young/new investors who don’t have finance degrees. I’m fairly market savvy, and I still enjoy the communication.

Moreover, the Titan emails that go out that provide quick updates on the overall market are excellent. They often take the form of “three quick things to know” and I find myself almost always reading it – even more than other more polished business & investing newsletters. Overall, you tend to get the feeling like you’re a part of a community when you deposit money with Titan. It’s very effective.

Of course, the performance is probably the most important thing, and Titan has been crushing the broader market since it got started. The Flagship portfolio is up just shy of 80% (as of writing) compared to the S&P 500 being up 46% over the same time frame. Opportunities which launched in August of 2020 is up 57.4% compared to the Russelll 2000 being up 25.2% over the same period.

Impressive performance. How will Titan hold up during a rougher period in the stock market? We shall see. Titan portfolios certainly have a “bent” towards technology names (though, to be fair, the portfolios aren’t only technology stocks), so a reversal in the performance of the technology space could certainly hit Titan portfolios. But, you can easily argue the other side of this situation as well. As in… perhaps it’d be irresponsible to not be weighted towards technology considering its role in society and our economy moving forward?

How is Titan different from most roboadvisors?

I’m not sure we should even be calling Titan Invest a roboadvisor. According to Investopedia, a roboadvisor is a digital platform that provides automated, algorithm-driven financial planning services with little to no human supervision. That doesn’t really describe what Titan is.

Titan is more like a low-cost hedge fund or stock picking service for entry level investors with a fancy digital front. Titan makes it clear that their team is picking the stocks. Both the Flagship and Opportunities portfolios are made of 20 stocks. That’s compared to a typical roboadvisor portfolio that puts your money into mostly index funds based on an algorithmically-generated asset allocation based on your risk profile, age and other factors. 

So, let’s not call Titan a roboadvisor. It’s an investment management service where you can have some people probably smarter than you pick some stocks for you and help you learn about the market… and you’ll have an awesome app interface to follow it all. It’s not criticism to say Titan isn’t a roboadvisor. In fact, I think it’s a good thing. Titan is providing a more unique service.

As the Titan Invest website says, “Think of us like a world class hedge fund in your pocket.” That’s a better description. But even that requires a little bit of clarification. Titan is not a hedge fund. In a hedge fund, the fund pools together the money from its investors and owns positions at the fund level. At Titan, you have an individual account and you actually own the stocks in the portfolio yourself.

To sum up, Titan picks stocks and positions for you like a hedge fund, but you actually own those individual positions in your own account a bit more like a roboadvisor account. Perhaps it’s best described like an active manager of your own account. Ok, enough about that.

Who should join Titan Invest?

Regardless of how savvy or experienced you are in the market, I think joining Titan could be of interest to you.

Also, regardless of how much assets you have invested via other accounts and services, I think joining Titan could be of interest to you.

If you have a 401(k), it’s likely in a number of ETFs or funds, so joining Titan could give you some interesting single stock exposure via the Titan team.

If you’re brand new to investing, I certainly suggest using Titan rather than trying to pick stocks yourself. Sure you could go the Robinhood route and just keep buying shares of Tesla (or partial shares of Tesla), or you could put money regularly into your Titan account and have it spread across 20 hand-selected stocks in the Titan Flagship portfolio. You can follow those stocks and learn about those companies via the Titan app. It’s more exciting than simply buying an S&P index fund, but it’s more diversified than investing in a handful of stocks you pick yourself.

Titan might have the best referral program out there

So, how much does Titan charge in fees? Titan charges a base 1% fee for its service, but by referring people, you can permanently lower this fee. Each referral leads to a .25% reduction in the fees Titan collects. So, refer four people and you’re getting charged zero.

When I joined, I immediately was able to get 3 of my friends to join, so I immediately went to a .25% fee on my assets in Titan. I love the referral program. Like most people, I don’t mind a 1% fee if my portfolio is outperforming the market as Titan has been doing, but if I can lower that further, I’m going to take advantage of it. 

I think that Titan put together a genius referral program. Users are highly incentivized to refer people, and it’s a win-win for Titan as they can continue to grow their user base and asset base.

How do you join Titan Invest?

Joining Titan is super easy. Follow these steps:

1. Click this link and create your account. 
2. Then you’ll download the app and login. 
3. After that you can begin funding your account which gets your money invested in the various Titan portfolios.

After getting setup, go refer some people are lower your management fee!

Titan Invest Screenshots

To give you a better feel or the Titan app interface, below are some screenshots. You’ll see I took these screenshots when I had about $2,500 in my account – all of it invested in Flagship.

Moreover, to give you a feel for the referrals interface, you can see the following screenshots:

A few specific moments I enjoyed while being a part of Titan Invest

Over the last year, the investing world has been struck by some high-flying IPOs. Companies such as Air BnB, Affirm and Doordash. Thankfully, Titan has showed restraint and doesn’t just jump at owning a position because it’s a big name (this isn’t a surprise, but just stating the reality). 

But what I did enjoy is that Titan sent out its research that it did on Air BnB to its members and investors. It broke down what it liked about Air BnB’s business and financials, and then explained why Titan would not be investing in Air BnB at this time. Very cool!

Additionally, Titan recently announced that they were exiting a position in Appian Corporation (APPN) and buying a position in Poshmark (POSH). APPN had exceeded Titan’s expectations and had actually shot up 4x since it initiated the position just last year. As such, Titan was taking profits and buying POSH which had declined 30% since it’s recent IPO. Titan doesn’t trade in and out of positions frequently at all, but I liked that they were taking advantage of the big move and moving capital into a new position.

Any criticism of Titan?

Nothing big. I really enjoy being part of Titan. If I’m splitting hairs here, I might say that Titan using the S&P 500 as its benchmark against Flagship is probably not overly accurate. It’s pretty heavily skewed towards technology companies, so perhaps comparing it to the Nasdaq 100 might be a better benchmark. But, hey, the S&P 500 has had its technology components increase and become a bigger and bigger weight in the index. As long as the absolute performance continues to be stellar, I don’t think anyone will care about using S&P 500 vs. Nasdaq 100 as the benchmark.

How Titan fits into my overall investing world

Since I was well along into my investing when I became aware of Titan, Titan has essentially just supplemented what I’m already doing. My investable assets are compromised of something like the following:

• 401(k): Assets are split amongst a handful of index funds
• Schwab account: Long-term account with my Roth IRA and basic equities account. Most of the assets are in index funds, with about 10% of the assets in a handful of non-index positions (e.g. Netflix stock and a few other positions).
• Titan Investment account

My 401(k) contributions always remain steady. I’ve halted contributions to my Schwab account while I build up my Titan account balance. I’m eager to cross the $10,000 threshold so I can allocate to the Opportunities fund on Titan.

Overall Titan is a small part of my investment accounts, but over time, it is likely to become a bigger piece of the pie.

Titan Invest Review and Rating

How would we rate the individual aspects of Titan? See below:

Frequently asked questions

If you made it this far…

…then you’re likely pretty interested. Click here to goto Titan and get started.