A lot actually, but their value isn’t in how they market themselves.
If you’ve seen ads for the Dub copy trading app, you’ve probably noticed their flashy marketing around copying Nancy Pelosi’s portfolio or other famous figures’ trades. While the celebrity angle makes for compelling advertising, the reality of what Dub actually offers is quite different and more interesting.
A Brief History of Dub: From Harvard Dropout to $47M in Funding
Before diving into what Dub actually offers,lets look at the company’s background.
Dub was founded in 2021 by 23-year-old Steven Wang, a Harvard dropout (oh if only us mortals could be financially set up enough to drop out of Harvard) who began investing in second grade with his parents’ blessing. The platform positions itself as “the first Regulated Copy Trading Platform in America,” operating as a FINRA-registered broker-dealer with SEC regulation and SIPC insurance up to $500,000.
The company has raised significant capital quickly: a $17 million seed round in 2024, followed by a $30 million Series A in 2025, bringing total funding to $47 million. The app has already surpassed 800,000 downloads, suggesting there’s real demand for this approach to investing.
The best part of Dub
Despite the marketing focus on following politicians and celebrities, Dub doesn’t provide real-time data on what these famous people are actually trading. Congressional disclosure requirements, for instance, allow lawmakers up to 45 days to report their trades, making “real-time” copying impossible.
What Dub does offer is something potentially more valuable: access to a diverse community of independent traders, some of whom have impressive track records.
The platform’s real strength lies in its community of retail traders who share their strategies transparently. You can browse through different trading profiles, examine their historical performance, risk metrics, and trading philosophy before deciding who to follow.
Some traders on the platform have developed genuinely interesting approaches. For full disclosure, I run two strategies myself:
- $BADPETROL (Up 34.63%): My strategy focused on betting against oil prices, capitalizing on energy market volatility
- $Phoenix (Up 49.76%): My tactical approach that goes into 3x leveraged stocks during market lows, then implements hedging strategies
We will get into these in another blog post.
My First Copy Trading Experience: Learning from No Risk No Rari
My introduction to copy trading came through Brett Simba’s “No Risk No Rari” strategy.
Simba, who founded the trading funding firm Tradeify and runs Simba Stocks, and like many successful model creators on platforms like Dub, he concentrates in single positions—a strategy that creates the kind of dramatic price swings that separate the memorable from the forgettable in today’s crowded copy trading landscape.
The thing you need to know about Dub: it rewards exactly this kind of high-risk approach because, frankly, how else do you get noticed among thousands of traders? My personal experience was a perfect case study in this volatility—I watched my account drop significantly during one of Simba’s major downturns, a painful reminder that the strategies generating the most buzz are often the ones swinging hardest in both directions.
He eventually made it all back. But It was an expensive lesson in the reality that in copy trading, the line between brilliance and recklessness often comes down to timing and luck as much as strategy.
