Houston investors back new platform for retail traders looking to follow financial influencers

making a splash

As anyone who witnessed the impact Gamestop's meme stock had on the country already realizes, influential investors can drive momentum within the financial sector. And one company with fresh funding from a Houston firm is betting on that exactly.

CashPool is a new mobile platform that gives everyday investors the opportunity to derive influence from the investment strategies and trades made by trusted and influential stock traders who have built substantial followings on social media platforms. By allowing retail traders the chance to join social media influencers’ various “pools” on its platform, CashPool is primed to change the way the masses acquire wealth.

This is the kind of algorithmic trading aimed at a new generation of investors that gets the attention of early-stage venture capital funds like Houston-based Ten X Labs, a pre-seed angel fund that recently invested in CashPool to help the trading platform continue its mission of transforming the investment landscape.

"We are thrilled to receive funding from Ten X Labs, as it validates our innovative approach to trading and investing," CashPool Founder and CEO Averett Barksdale says in a news release. "This investment will enable us to further enhance our platform, expand our user base and continue to revolutionize the industry. We believe that everyone should have transparent, governed access to profitable trading and investment opportunities, and through CashPool we are making that vision a reality."

Connecting the dots

CashPool is broker agnostic connector, allowing its users to keep their current brokers like Robinhood, Coinbase, Charles Schwab, Acorns, Fidelity, ETRADE, Stash, Sofi and Betterment and creates a seamless investment experience.

“We are that middle piece,” says Barksdale. “So your money stays on whatever brokerage you’ve connected to the platform, and we just execute the trades on your brokerage for you.”

Considering that users’ money remains with their original brokerage, how does CashPool monetize its platform?

“We don’t charge users to execute trades,” says Barksdale. “We charge per pool you join. So, on our platform, strategies are called pools and a user can join as many strategies as they want.”

Financial influencers set the strategies. These are profitable traders who have become influencers on various social media platforms and built-up followings comprised of people who are or are desiring to be retail traders themselves.

“There are a ton of people out there who actually are profitable traders,” says Barksdale. “Same as what we saw happen with GameStop and the whole Reddit situation. That was a financial influencer, right? It just so happens that he had a strategy that he thought would work and it turned out for a while it did work, right?

“We want to not only empower the retail trader, but empower these financial influencers who are profitable as well. Just because it's a whole marketplace out there for it. But a lot of times the retail trader doesn't quite understand who to go with. On our platform, you could see the results of these financial influencers right before your eyes on our platform. So you can see if they're profitable or not, or if someone's just on Instagram or whatever, social media platform posting screenshots but aren’t actually executing those trades.”

Increasing transparency

With trading, past success can be an arbiter for future performance, so with CashPool, users can choose to join the pools of influencers who have documented success as a trader on the platform.

“On our platform you can't hide,” says Barksdale. “We're connected to their brokerage account, so we see what trades they're making in real time. We also see their performance in real time, and we display that on the platform. That's something that you really can't get around. So if someone on Instagram says they traded this stock, then I made X amount of dollars and had this percentage of return, then you go to the platform and look at your pool and see they didn't do that and were lying the whole time, it’s literally just putting everything out there in the open. We have the kind of transparency that doesn't exist currently right now in the space.”

Broadcasting one’s successes is easy, but what about the losses?

“I thought it was going to be a lot more difficult just thinking, do people really want to show what they're doing?” says Barksdale. “But the thing that I've seen is a lot of these traders are a whole lot more competitive. And the traders who are doing it, they're constantly talking out against people who aren't actually doing it in real life.

“A lot of the traders who are actually profitable, they do live trades every day. But how do users if they should pay to get into a specific trader’s live trading session? Like, how do they know they're profitable already?

“On CashPool, users can see an actual influencer's win rate and say, 'Okay, 86 percent of the time they are profitable, and I could see how many trades they've made in total.' From that standpoint, users can make an educated decision on what pools to join and pay for.”

CashPool users can join as many pools as they see fit, but the cost of each pool’s membership may vary due to the popularity or success percentage rate of the financial influencer.

“You can join as many pools as you want, but what we suggest is you start by joining the pools of influencers that you already follow and trust, that you're already following like on Twitter or YouTube or Instagram or whatever it may be,” says Barksdale. “We are suggesting that you follow them first and you join their pools first. What we do is on the monetization side is we allow the creators on our platform who are the influencers to set their own price for their pool.”

Building a secure network

Outside of who or what to follow, information security is likely a concern for potential users. Financial influencers’ trade information is readily available (win percentages and number of trades, not dollar amounts), but users’ won’t be able to see other users’ information on the platform.

“Currently, we have a list of 10 brokerages who are on board, and then we're working to onboard more as we keep going on,” says Barksdale. “So, we have like your Interactive brokerages, and we also have a few other ones that are UK specific and Canada specific. We would love to have every single brokerage on the platform, but unfortunately, there are a couple that are still kind of playing hard to get, so to speak.”

The first rollout of CashPool is set, but version two will likely include content creation from the financial influencers.

Barksdale, who has a background in product development and experience working at companies like Charles Schwab and Fidelity, is mostly excited about the prospect of CashPool unlocking expert financial strategies for everyone, not just the financial advisors behind the closed doors of Wall Street.

“Yes, my philosophy is that financial health and financial growth should be accessible for all,” says Barksdale. “The thing that gets me is it needs to be responsible. So, for example, RobinHood is a platform that doesn't necessarily care if you are making responsible decisions, they just care that you're trading on that platform.

“Our platform is strictly focused on actually being the place where these retail traders can make responsible decisions centered around investing and trading.”

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Rice University researchers unveil new model that could sharpen MRI scans

MRI innovation

Researchers at Rice University, in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have developed a new model that could lead to sharper imaging and safer diagnostics using magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI.

In a study recently published in The Journal of Chemical Physics, the team of researchers showed how they used the Fokker-Planck equation to better understand how water molecules respond to contrast agents in a process known as “relaxation.” Previous models only approximated how water molecules relaxed around contrasting agents. However, through this new model, known as the NMR eigenmodes framework, the research team has uncovered the “full physical equations” to explain the process.

“The concept is similar to how a musical chord consists of many notes,” Thiago Pinheiro, the study’s first author, a Rice doctoral graduate in chemical and biomolecular engineering and postdoctoral researcher in the chemical sciences division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said in a news release. “Previous models only captured one or two notes, while ours picks up the full harmony.”

According to Rice, the findings could lead to the development and application of new contrast agents for clearer MRIs in medicine and materials science. Beyond MRIs, the NMR relaxation method could also be applied to other areas like battery design and subsurface fluid flow.

“In the present paper, we developed a comprehensive theory to interpret those previous molecular dynamics simulations and experimental findings,” Dilipkumar Asthagiri, a senior computational biomedical scientist in the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said in the release. ”The theory, however, is general and can be used to understand NMR relaxation in liquids broadly.”

The team has also made its code available as open source to encourage its adoption and further development by the broader scientific community.

“By better modeling the physics of nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation in liquids, we gain a tool that doesn’t just predict but also explains the phenomenon,” Walter Chapman, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice, added in the release. “That is crucial when lives and technologies depend on accurate scientific understanding.”

The study was backed by The Ken Kennedy Institute, Rice Creative Ventures Fund, Robert A. Welch Foundation and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Houston-area lab grows with focus on mobile diagnostics and predictive medicine

mobile medicine

When it comes to healthcare, access can be a matter of life and death. And for patients in skilled nursing facilities, assisted living or even their own homes, the ability to get timely diagnostic testing is not just a convenience, it’s a necessity.

That’s the problem Principle Health Systems (PHS) set out to solve.

Founded in 2016 in Clear Lake, Texas, PHS began as a conventional laboratory but quickly pivoted to mobile diagnostics, offering everything from core blood work and genetic testing to advanced imaging like ultrasounds, echocardiograms, and X-rays.

“We were approached by a group in a local skilled nursing facility to provide services, and we determined pretty quickly there was a massive need in this area,” says James Dieter, founder, chairman and CEO of PHS. “Turnaround time is imperative. These facilities have an incredibly sick population, and of course, they lack mobility to get the care that they need.”

What makes PHS unique is not only what they do, but where they do it. While they operate one of the largest labs serving skilled nursing facilities in the state, their mobile teams go wherever patients are, whether that’s a nursing home, a private residence or even a correctional facility.

Diagnostics, Dieter says, are at the heart of medical decision-making.

“Seventy to 80 percent of all medical decisions are made from diagnostic results in lab and imaging,” he says. “The diagnostic drives the doctor’s or the provider’s next move. When we recognized a massive slowdown in lab results, we had to innovate to do it faster.”

Innovation at PHS isn’t just about speed; it’s about accessibility and precision.

Chris Light, COO, explains: “For stat testing, we use bedside point-of-care instruments. Our phlebotomists take those into the facilities, test at the bedside, and get results within minutes, rather than waiting days for results to come back from a core lab.”

Scaling a mobile operation across multiple states isn’t simple, but PHS has expanded into nine states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Arizona. Their model relies on licensed mobile phlebotomists, X-ray technologists and sonographers, all trained to provide high-level care outside traditional hospital settings.

The financial impact for patients is significant. Instead of ambulance rides and ER visits costing thousands, PHS services often cost just a fraction, sometimes only tens or hundreds of dollars.

“Traditionally, without mobile diagnostics, the patient would be loaded into a transportation vehicle, typically an ambulance, and taken to a hospital,” Dieter says. “Our approach is a fraction of the cost but brings care directly to the patients.”

The company has also embraced predictive and personalized medicine, offering genetic tests that guide medication decisions and laboratory tests that predict cognitive decline from conditions like Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s.

“We actively look for complementary services to improve patient outcomes,” Dieter says. “Precision medicine and predictive testing have been a great value-add for our providers.”

Looking to the future, PHS sees mobile healthcare as part of a larger trend toward home-based care.

“There’s an aging population that still lives at home with caretakers,” Dieter explains. “We go into the home every day, whether it’s an apartment, a standalone home, or assisted living. The goal is to meet patients where they are and reduce the need for hospitalization.”

Light highlighted another layer of innovation: predictive guidance.

“We host a lot of data, and labs and imaging drive most treatment decisions,” Light says. “We’re exploring how to deploy diagnostics immediately based on results, eliminating hours of delay and keeping patients healthier longer.”

Ultimately, innovation at PHS isn’t just about technology; it’s about equity.

“There’s an 11-year life expectancy gap between major metro areas and rural Texas,” Dieter says. “Our innovation has been leveling the field, so everyone has access to high-quality diagnostics and care, regardless of where they live.”

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