“Investors should not use themselves as guinea pigs for new financial products like broker platforms,” said  Charles Rotblut, vice president of the American Association of Individual Investors, a nonprofit education and research group.

Small Player

At times, dark pools have tripped up even the biggest investors. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has faulted dark-pool operators Deutsche Bank AG, Credit Suisse Group AG, Barclays Plc and UBS Group AG for poor disclosure and levied tens of million of dollars in fines. (Deutsche Bank said the government didn’t allege intentional wrongdoing. Barclays, Credit Suisse and UBS declined to comment.)

Catering to big institutional customers, major dark pools at banks do a massive business. In a recent week, the UBS pool, which is the largest, handled 459 million shares of top-tier companies. Ustocktrade processed about 3,500 shares, so the company needs to rely on the CEO superuser.

“Its structure is very unusual in retail trading,” said Tyler Gellasch, executive director of the Healthy Markets Association and a former SEC counsel. “I would expect regulators might have a lot of questions about how the firm manages its conflicts of interest.”

Ustocktrade, which opened for business in January 2016, said it needs the CEO to step in until it establishes a critical mass of trading for investors. “The goal is for the system to expand to a point where no Superuser is needed, and all trades are customer to customer,” the company said in a statement.

Charitable Aim

Even more unusual, Ustocktrade pledges to plow its profits into the Cainan Foundation, a charity established by Weeresinghe and his wife to build schools for children in underprivileged communities. The CEO said the foundation, which is still funded by his family, is in the process of gaining approval from authorities in Sri Lanka to construct its first international boarding school.

Eli Duduit, a senior at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, said Ustocktrade’s social mission won him over. He used the brokerage to trade penny stocks such as Eleven Biotherapeutics Inc. that he learned about on a site called StockTwits. He doesn’t trade anymore because he lost $50.

“I felt a personal relationship with the company,” said Duduit, who is majoring in economics and finance. “They do it to educate children across the world. They don’t do it to rip you off.”