TradeWizer V3.0 — A Market PaaS

Published in

Prodio DesignWorks

5 min readSep 11, 2020

Earlier I’ve spoken about our early attempt to design a trading product and the second version of dumping the product and becoming an algo.

As happens with any product , and I’m glad with us its happening not as pivoting but as drawing board iteration , we’re arrived at the third version of the idea.

Design Challenge

To build a high engagement trader community around actionable knowledge.

Technology has penetrated trading but only from speed to execution or analytics angle. However real world trader community is driven by perspectives, knowledge , experiences , mentorship and coaching. But all of this is offline and when the moment of action arrives nothing stands between a trader and his mistake. Also knowledge is often not actionable within the window of opportunity. Lessons learnt are not codified into trading behaviour. If they are , they are not adhered to and the tools do not support being able to adhere to wisdom. There is a wide disconnect between what you know and what you do.

Build a product that expands the knowledge, narrows the gap between knowledge and action by providing intervening tools. Bring together people traders like a multi-player video game into the trading environment.

Insight

In his work day a developer functions like a trader, writting code that makes choices for expected outcome, checks for expected outcome and debugs in case of failure. He has best practices, design patterns, debugging tools and monitoring mechanisms. Why can’t a trader have similar tools. More so because a lot of developers are also traders. And a lot of trade is being done through code.

Strategy

Something is going to come here

Approach

What is the idea?

It is to become a platform-as-a-service that helps any broker to bring their clients on a modern well designed trading interface without much sweat.

Why this idea?

Because this solves our distribution problem. The reason why we abandoned V1 was there was no point building the product and then looking to distribute it. This solves distribution because there is an underserved broker community crowd that is tech challenged and if this was available , they’d bring all their clients on this.

And then, we’ll make it cheap for them by charging only pay-per-transaction. This gives us daily stream of money without any distribution, marketing, sales , almost no other function. It’s a pure API platform that charges for letting transactions pass through our infrastructure. Its daily cash- cha-ching!!!

Cash solves many problems

The daily cash generated purely as a funtion of number of trades goes to fund the further feature list coming out on the transaction front end, the virtuous circle is established in every widening circles.

What are we going to do with the cash?

To build more scaleable and fault free engineering that supports ever larger number of transactions should be the first priority. Making the front ends more and more well designed should be another.

But most important will be to then start rolling out the set of features that gives the traders the tools the developers have for debugging and building their solution. A set of trading tools that are not based on future, opportunity but instead on risk, education , retrospection , trading wisdoms, trading styles, personalisation, trade coaching, community formation.

And what happens then?

It is a fundamental insight that the trading technology field has levelled, the direction in which it will go is community formations and specific knowledge principles of the community that must be expressed in the tools the community uses. That is how open source community gathers around a new technology, that is how hip-hop artists and rappers gather around studios and teenagers gather around influencers.

Why is trading different then — why do traders continue to be on twitter or whereever and the concepts or insights they explain each other have not many tangile and immediate tools through which to express it.

So we keep building such trader tools untill the product is seen as go to platform for new & experienced traders.

So what features will the first version of the product have?

First is 4 epics

A well designed app and web front end for trading
A well designed backoffice
An SDK for programmatic access to everything offered in UI
A good way to buy mutual funds — with or without advisors

Because these address the first need of the brokers who control clients and through which transactions and therefore distribution starts arriving.

Immediately after this will be a feature set that allows any advisor to create acquisition pipeline of clients.

Post that the rich feature set of retrospection, machine learning based risk controls , trading wisdoms etc.

Are there any rich feature set you already imagine?

Bring fintwits into trading environment and make them actionable.

Here’s how executing a trade directly based on a tweet may look like in a trading system. Just to give you the idea.

Build library of trading wisdoms of great traders

Will post how this might look later

Retrospection tool that points common mistakes made

A screener to analyse your trades. e.g. what if you wanted to see

all your trades analysed as per this wisdom. Or this wisdom even automatically defining what’s the max amount you should be willing to lose based on your past trades — clue, not more than your average win.

Full flow charts attached to trades or market data to filter opportunities