The View from the Office. 

I met up with StockStory Founder Adam Hejl at the Eska Bakery in the Karlin section of Prague.

Karlin has become the destination for the city’s hipsters and startups since being redeveloped after a devastating flood in 2002. The Eska Bakery is at the epicenter. 

Adam is building a global tech and content company that is both a throwback to an earlier era and so modern it couldn’t have happened even a few years ago.

StockStory combines AI with insights from Wall Street caliber analysts to generate stock tips for retail investors focused on U.S. stocks. 

It’s a business that harkens back to the Value Line research which began publishing almost a century ago, but also draws inspiration from the more recent success of the Motley Fool, which has grown into a behemoth. 

Adam’s big insight is that there is a largeish number of retail investors looking for quality stocks to buy and they are willing to pay hundreds of dollars a year for good ideas if they make money on the trades. The company has a few thousand customers and is growing at about 50 percent every quarter. 

It’s a simple concept but runs contrary to the conventional wisdom that a) no one will pay for content and b) retail investors should buy ETFs or aspire to Bloomberg-like analysis tools. 

Adam argues none of those things are true. Retail investors want a story, not numbers. If they come across a Swiss company that makes great running shoes that Roger Federer likes, it’s a buy. It’s how Peter Lynch used to do it. 

StockStory runs lean. There are just eight employees split between New York and Prague. The U.S. registered company raised $3 million in seed capital from angels and VCs.

The three analysts at StockStock cover about 1,200 U.S. companies. They leverage AI and lots of computing power to assemble the background data included in reports. They then add insights and review reports before publishing.

The firm invests money in their top recommendations to ensure they have skin in the game. Adam said a portfolio of their top picks handily beat the S&P 500 since inception. At some point the firm may create a separate fund for investors to invest in the picks. 

The company publishes machine-generated news as a way to attract customers. The articles are created by applying AI algorithms to earnings filings and other data. The content is distributed via Apple News, Yahoo Finance and Dow Jones. 

StockStory is a great example of how the convergence of tech and globalization is reshaping the landscape for what can be done with financial information.

Here we have a guy in Prague with a platoon-sized team operating a Delaware-based company making U.S. stock picks with text generation technology the major platforms aren’t using yet.

The world is so cool!

You can find Adam on LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.