When retail investors discover TiiCKER, some have questions about how stock perks work, or sometimes they have a question about the way that TiiCKER works. So the editorial team periodically digs into our mailbag to answer some common questions about TiiCKER. We want you to get the most out of the platform that rewards shareholders for simply owning stock in their favorite companies.

Question:  “Being relatively new to TiiCKER I am trying to understand the benefits, both for myself, and for the participating companies. Can you help me understand how TiiCKER builds community? In my world my connections, and the clients I make through networking is a key component of the success of my business. As an event planner, a solo entrepreneur, the relationships I make in my community feed me, literally, they’re essential to my success.

"This may be a question that other people don’t care about, or have interest in understanding better, but for me, community is my central focus—whether the people I am serving or my base of resources and providers, my community plays a large role in my work.” – Alison K., Portland, OR

Answer: Alison, building community is vital to our work at TiiCKER, as well. And understanding how TiiCKER’s community works will help you, and other retail investors to understand your importance to us.

TiiCKER is a collective of publicly traded companies seeking to reward individual investors, like yourself, for their loyalty and ownership. Previously, companies didn’t have a way to connect with shareholders, and weren’t easily able to even identify their individual shareholders. TiiCKER has created a bridge that connects the community of shareholders to the companies in their portfolio.

As shareholders find that TiiCKER is easy to use, and enjoy the perks, the community of TiiCKER users grows, connecting investors with other investors. While investors spend more time on the platform, they become more familiar with companies similar to those in your portfolio, looking at them as new potential stock buying options. A reliable and trusted place to explore, TiiCKER can introduce you to intriguing companies you may not have heard of yet.

What you may not know, is how far the retail shareholder market has come. Once considered an afterthought, when compared to institutional investors, Wall Street’s major players, it has grown into a formidable force. Retail investors’ share of total trading volume has climbed from just above 10% in 2011 to over 22% in 2021, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. And in the data gathered from IBISWorld, the individual investor market reached $7.2 trillion as of early 2023.

Retail stockholders like yourself, have been busy these last few years. We’ve seen results from a study by Bloomberg Intelligence that retail investor activity has almost doubled between 2010 to 2020. And in the early part of this year, retail shareholders infused the market with an average of $1.5 billion each day, according to VandaTrack data. This is a massive community of investors that have the potential to connect to TiiCKER’s benefits. Public companies should take note of this expanding community as well and connect with TiiCKER to see how your company can tap into this huge market.

These statistics seem even more impressive when you take into account the effect that the threat of economic uncertainty, the potential of looming inflation, and recent high volatility can typically have on investor interest. So with the sizable growth of individual investors, your investor community is not small; in fact, since joining TiiCKER, your community has expanded to include not only the companies in which you have purchased stock, but also the retail investor community of which you are a part.

We hope you feel like your network has expanded and that you feel like you belong to something great, Alison, and that you have a better understanding of how community is created at TiiCKER. 

Keep on investing and don’t forget to tell your friends about TiiCKER where you can be rewarded simply for owning shares of stock in companies you already know and love.