Motif Launches Build-Your-Own Platform

Motif Investing, the Silicon Valley company that pioneered ideas-based stock investing, launched a build-your-own (BYO) platform Thursday that allows advisors and other businesses to construct and share their own collection of stocks or exchange-traded funds online.

The just-launched BYO feature on the Motif website, powered by the proprietary Motif Publishing Platform, is what Motif calls the next iteration of its “mission to empower individuals to invest in, and profit from, real-world trends and ideas in a cost-effective manner.”

Hardeep Walia (left), Motif’s co-founder and CEO, told AdvisorOne in an interview that “in the next quarter,” Motif will also be launching additional tools and services for advisors under Motif Advisor Services. “We are helping advisor through our proprietary technology,” Walia said.

The BYO program “is a game-changer for online investing,” Walia says. “The ability to build your own motifs gives entrepreneurial investors, advisors and others a new, highly visible platform from which they can market their own investment ideas and strategies to a wide audience.”

Since last year, Motif’s customers have been able to purchase pre-built “motifs”—portfolios of stocks, bonds or ETFs linked by common themes such as tablet computing, inflation or home improvement—assembled by Motif’s in-house research team. Other motifs created by the company include an “all-American motif” and a Facebook motif of companies that are the “most liked” on Facebook.

While investors could customize those motifs to their liking, they did not have the ability to build their own custom motifs from scratch until now, the company says.

A big fan of Vanguard founder John Bogle, who pioneered low-cost index fund investing, Walia says Motif, too, is a “low-cost financial product.”