In light of the GameStop memestock saga, more Americans are beginning to participate in the stock market, and the Grifin app is looking to help new retail investors learn the ropes by encouraging them to invest in businesses they are familiar with.
Aaron Froug, founder and CEO of Grifin (which stands for Greatest Revolution in Finance Is Now), told Cheddar that he wanted to make investing as simple as possible for beginners.
"Investing, there's a lot of emotions that go into it. It's hard, and so I think we just wanted to create something that was a little bit more human and a simple way for anybody to get started so that they could feel confident enough and excited enough to be able to do it themselves," he said.
The "simple" concept behind Grifin's rapid rise took off after a viral TikTok video circulated on the internet pushing the app to near the top of the download charts.
"TikTok is incredible. It's absolutely amazing," Froug stated. "We posted just one video, and it changed our lives overnight. So, I think we're just so thankful to the community. We were number 11 overall in the entire app store because of that video."
So how does it work? Users link their bank accounts to their Grifin account and shop as normal. Wherever a user shops, a dollar will automatically be invested into that company. If a user happens to shop at a store that is not publicly traded, a dollar will be stored in an interest-bearing account in which funds then could be used later to invest in publicly traded companies.
In January, when apps like Robinhood halted trading on companies like GameStop and AMC, it opened a can of worms bringing to question the legal and ethical considerations of preventing retail investors from participating. For Froug, it became important to truly protect investors while maintaining the simplicity of the app.
"We built the app to kind of have its own guardrails, and so there's no options, there's no margins," he explained. "Basically, you can set a monthly limit within it so if you only want to put away a certain amount a month, you actually can do that, as well as you can only invest in the companies that you spend with. So, it really is a limited universe."
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A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
