Green, Gray or Red: A Traffic Light for the Stock Market | Sean Tepper, Tykr

Most people open a brokerage account and then freeze. Every blog and analyst says something different, and the default move is to guess or hand your money to someone else.

Sean Tepper lived that. He started investing around 2010, made some money, lost some money, and hit the pause button in 2015 before it got expensive. Then he went looking for what Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were actually doing, and concluded they were not picking stocks on feel. They were starting with math.

So he built the math into a spreadsheet, tested it privately for five years rather than five weeks, and turned it into Tykr: a platform that rates stocks like a traffic light. Green means on sale, gray means watch, red means overpriced. Duolingo style lessons sit underneath it, because the goal is not to hand someone a signal, it is to make them an investor who does not need one.

And he is raising. About $600K in on roughly a $1.3M target, running on WeFunder, funded largely by the same retail investors who already pay for the product. He walks through why he chose angels over VCs, why he intends to keep 100 percent control, and the Kohler and Costco story behind his plan to reach a million subscribers.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Intro: the red light

00:25 The 90 second pitch: Tykr, 13,000 customers, 50 countries

01:16 Origin story: 20 years in tech and the 2015 pause button

02:17 Phil Town, Buffett and Munger, and the math behind value investing

02:43 Five years of testing before writing a single line of code

03:13 Motley Fool, Seeking Alpha, Simply Wall St and a thin field

03:41 A year to build, live in 2020