Frec

This photo was taken minutes before I took the stage at a conference in San Diego this week. The event was at the Hotel del Coronado and organized by venture capitalist Howard Lindzon, whose firm Social Leverage provided seed capital for Frec to launch in 2023. One of the things most people who start companies know is that you have to spend a fair amount of time telling your story. It’s part of the education process. In the year since we’ve launched, I’ve probably told the story about how Frec is an investment platform that makes direct indexing accessible to a broader range of investors over 100 times. A hundred presentations that usually take about an hour over the past year is a huge amount of practice. Nevertheless, I still get anxious right before I’m going to get up on stage. In this case, I was speaking in front of about 150 people. Once I get going and fall into a rhythm explaining the intricacies of the product, however, I get excited and my nerves disappear. Frec is not a product that you pitch; it’s a product you explain. Once people understand the dynamics of how tax loss harvesting can systematically boost returns and how Frec provides accessibility to a product previously only available to family offices, they are interested. Interestingly, I don’t get the same level of anxiety doing Zoom webinars even though typically there are several hundred people who dial into those. I doubt anyone starts a company realizing how much of their time will be spent on communication, but pretty quickly you realize it’s an important part of the job. And the more speeches and Webinars and presentations you do, the better you get.

New episode of the podcast is out! Slava Rubin talked with Mo Al Adham, the founder and CEO of Frec, about direct indexing and tax loss harvesting, which are very underappreciated tools to help investors to save money. Full episode here: https://lnkd.in/g4VgA4mT Here, Mo explains what direct indexing is:

Are you looking for ways to reduce your concentrated stock holdings? Join me and Mo Al Adham for a FIREside chat & Q&A with the FAANG FIRE community on August 14th. https://lu.ma/ibqgg3q9 Mo will share the latest data the Frec team has put together on using direct indexing to diversify from concentrated positions in a tax efficient way. They have some really interesting case studies that mirror real world scenarios FAANG workers go through. I have personally been using Frec the past 2 months and can share my experiences so far. I hope to see you there!

I just broke one of my own rules. I bought individual company shares instead of my usual index fund. And I didn’t just buy 1 company… Meta? I bought it. AAPL? I bought it. AMZN? I bought it. NFLX? I bought it. Google? I bought it. TSLA? I bought it. NVDA? I bought it. That is just a fraction. I spent $100,000 and now own nearly actual shares in nearly all 500 companies in the S&P 500. Why did I do this? To drastically increase my ability to tax loss harvest to offset some upcoming capital gains. In the past I could never make this strategy work. The fees were always too high for my boglehead shaped brain. But now that is changing. The fees have gotten incredibly low. I am paying 0.10%. Since I would normally buy VOO which has a fee of 0.03% I view the effective fee for me to actually be 0.07%. Learn more in today’s newsletter: https://lnkd.in/gj5ECK9g

We are excited to announce Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta's VP of GenAI, will be joining us at the Frec office for a fireside chat the evening of Thursday, May 30th. There are still a number of spots available. If you would like to join, please comment below or DM me here on LinkedIn. It’s an incredible privilege to host Ahmad, who I’ve known since our days studying at the University of Waterloo. I majored in software engineering; he studied computer engineering. Ahmad brings a wealth of knowledge and perspective about technology in general and AI in particular. Prior to Meta, he spent 16 years at Apple. Before he joined Apple officially, he had the extraordinary opportunity to work as an intern on the designs of the iPhone before it was announced. That happened because Waterloo has an internship program where students alternate each semester between classes and internships. I spent my time interning at Texas Instruments, AMD and Microsoft. Since joining Meta in 2020, Ahmad has been enmeshed in the world of generative AI. According to an article in The Information, he was tapped by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to lead the research and development of foundation models like Llama and products like Meta AI. We plan to ask Ahmad for his perspective on the speed and growth of gen AI and LLMs and how they might transform the financial services sector. What else should we ask him?

We recently spoke to some of our customers to hear their stories. Among them is Richard, a former hedge fund manager and a current finance professor who teaches on topics like alternative investments and wealth management. He’s also one of Frec’s first customers -- he joined after taking a deep dive into our whitepapers. “In the past, ETFs surpassed mutual funds in popularity due to ETFs being a superior investment product. Looking forward, direct indexing may well one day replace ETFs. People are going to recognize that having a passive indexing account at places like Frec is better than owning an ETF.” As an investor who always wants to understand how his financial products work, Richard was frustrated with other brokerages because “there was zero ability to ask any questions or to find out anything about what’s going on inside the product.” With Frec, this changed: “I am welcome to ask questions. I can look under the hood.” Read more about his Frec journey here ?