But what really matters to investors?
Discovery Beats Search
Imagine someone is currently interested in cybersecurity. Or the energy transition. Or the World Cup. This person opens your trading app and sees: an empty search field.
The field seems neutral, but it isn’t. It imposes a silent condition: Tell me exactly what you want. It rewards anyone who already has a name, an abbreviation, or an ISIN in mind. To everyone else, it says unspoken: Come back when you’ve made up your mind.
But very few people think in terms of ticker symbols. They think in terms of topics. And it’s precisely on the path between vague interest and a specific search term that platforms lose their users. About one-third of the roughly 37 million brokerage accounts in Germany are considered permanently or largely inactive. That’s not a user problem. It’s a design problem.
Other industries have long since flipped this logic on its head. Over 80 percent of the content viewed on Netflix comes from recommendations, not from active searches. The search bar there is the emergency exit, not the main entrance. Investors bring this expectation—shaped by streaming, e-commerce, and social media—to every app, including yours.
Search is indispensable for anyone who knows what they want. But it comes later. Discovery starts before that: It picks up on the topic and leads from there to a concrete idea. In our collaboration with justTRADE, this difference translated into 83 percent interaction, 62 percent deep engagement, and 10 percent conversion directly into the order flow—with minimal IT effort.
The takeaway: The question for your platform isn’t whether your users think in terms of themes. It’s whether your interface allows them to.
In our report, “Discovery Beats Search,” we explore how thematic investing shortens the path from inspiration to trade—and why more choice tends to exacerbate the problem rather than solve it.