Blossom Social Investing App Review

I enjoy reading investing and personal finance posts. I frequently lurk on the r/PersonalFinanceCanada, r/CanadianInvestor, and r/dividends subreddits. Unfortunately, most of the posts aren’t that interesting. r/dividends is primarily Redditors posting about investing in dividend-paying or high-yield ETFs like SCHD and JEPI. There’s the occasional post asking if there are any downsides to investing in some stock that pays double-digit yields. There’s also the occasional post asking whether anyone has discovered the “infinite money glitch” (sarcasm) of buying a dividend-paying stock before the ex-dividend date and then selling immediately after. r/dividends is primarily focused on the US, rarely contains posts discussing valuation, and the repetition gets old quickly.

I was notified of a new app, called Blossom Social Investing, through a YouTube channel that I subscribe to. It’s a social media app that is focused on investing in Canada. You can think of it as similar to Reddit, but with a singular focus. Once you download the app, you set up your account, choose topics (e.g. banks, real estate, technical analysis, etc.) that you want to follow, choose which influencers you want to follow, and you can post immediately. You can also upload your portfolio manually or connect your brokerage account. There are only a few supported brokerage accounts. Those who connect their brokerage accounts have a checkmark next to their holdings to indicate that the holding has been verified. It’s a nice way to add extra validation as anyone can make up a fake portfolio that makes them look like a stock-picking guru. I manually entered my positions because I have accounts at unsupported brokerages and justified or not, I simply don’t trust that my financial data will be safe.

Most of the posts that I’ve seen on Blossom are short. Even my single post describing why I recently purchased shares of T.TO is short. I would love to provide more due diligence, but creating a post on a smartphone sucks. Blossom doesn’t have a web interface. You can’t attach supporting assets (e.g. images) to the post. Most users end up linking to longer posts elsewhere or posting links to their YouTube videos.

This brings me to my next point about the types of users you find on Blossom. There are 2 major groups of users on Blossom: beginner investors and social media influencers. The social media influencers are there to promote their investing YouTube channels by posting links to their videos. Inviting them onto the platform was a smart move by the Blossom team because it provides some legitimacy to their app. Some of their posts are interesting. After all, I found out about Blossom through a YouTube channel that I subscribe to. On Blossom, I discovered Dan Kent from Stock Trades. He provides quality content both on Blossom and on his YouTube channel.

The beginner investors are absolute beginners. They are primarily looking for advice on what to buy next. Responses to these “what to buy” requests are usually short. Again, it’s hard to have meaningful discussion in the comments section, especially when the comments section doesn’t allow formatting, images, etc. I get the feeling that absolute beginners just want someone else to tell them what to do. They don’t want to do their own research because they don’t know how. I know because I’ve been there and many, many, many years later I finally learned.

Whenever a user buys or sells shares, they can create a post that includes the price and the percent of that equity purchased or sold. This is one of my favorite features because I want to see what people are buying and selling. What I often see is people buying the same stocks. Currently, there are lots of people buying ENB.TO and CNR.TO after their share prices declined. Users reported that recent purchases on their brokerages are not syncing with Blossom, so there are still kinks to work out.

I give the app a solid 3 out of 5. Don’t expect to learn much. But if you’re an investing influencer who wants to boost their website or YouTube channel traffic, Blossom is an avenue to consider.

Update: I realize now that you can add images to posts, so that’s a huge plus.