First Pitch
There’s a person I respect from my first company. He invested in it. Over years we’ve developed a certain personal comfort and since i started conceptualising Wizzer since 2021 he’s been hearing me out and offering his advice — also declaiming i’d never take it.
I went to him for the first pitch demo.
It opened gingerly in their boardroom with my team already prepared with apple TV and HDMI cables, not leaving anything to chance. I opened with a full screen display of CastleGate’s Quant Investing product — Dual Momentum and how it involved multiple strategies packed in a single product that would require creating basket of stocks and which will need periodic rebalancing also monitoring for instrument level and basket level triggers for rebalancing, profit booking or exits. With that I opened up the premise that no other advisory SaaS product exists that can serve quant advisory firms in fully automated mode.
We showed how the baskets just seamless executed, answered questions on unexecuted trades and follow up actions, creation of strategy , creation of product , demoed how the margins are allocated for the product and backoffice integrations etc.
The discussion then turned to — that most advisors are really simple minded and don't have high flying strategies We did convincingly show that any advisor all he has to do is just create product indicating his style — name it and then tag every advice he sends out in that style with the name of the strategy and everything is taken care of.
Our investor was in discussion with a HFT fund to invest his own money and raised questions related to how a product can be made market neutral with multiple strategies and allocation. This piece is clear in our product — we pack a commercial layer of “product” and link any number of strategies with differing styles within a product and they may get active-inactive under different market regimes producing a net equity curve that is smoother. We showed the margin/capital allocation tool and even the swaps amongst the strategies depending upon which one is performing better.
Then the discussion turned to why would be give away such an advantage as a trading/advisory firm as a product to everybody. I asked for an estimate for how much the HFT Fund’s infrastructure would cost from grounds up — answer was it can’t be done easily and still it should cost $20MM.
That is the point of Wizzer’s Advisory Terminal. It productises essential pro advisory & trader’s infrastructure with a suit of — analytics →features → tools →backtesting tools → clean data → integrated IDE to code and deploy your strategy repos on one click → ai to prompt -N- code most quant strategies an experienced active trader graduating to being a quant and systamatic trader may want → finally predictive models (predictive models had come from another Quant FM i’d met ) . Something like this.
This productising sophisticated infrastructure to enable more active traders to migrate to a new segment of sophisticated pro traders and advisors who can manufacture their products on this is key thesis.
the discussion then turned to — does this segment exist.
Look at this — any product here — has lifted the users from being stuck with legacy terminals to easy to use begineer tradnig terminal that made trading as easy as angry bird game.
What no terminal does — make the trader any wiser on his trading style, stats, probabilities, automations, monitoring. Even risk measurement and management features are minimal or absent.
What does an active trader who works as IT professional , between 20–30 years of age lack ?
The most natural tools for writting his trading code, commiting trading code, watching his trading code’s performance historically and deciding to commit capital, scenarios , multiple versions of his trading code, code-commit -deploy -test — take it to production.
This is what he does day in an out in his day job. Why should he not trade with a terminal more sophisticated and attuned to his tech abilities so that he can automate his trading, atleast some aspects.
Wizzer believes there are 500,000 active traders out there in that professional crowd that’s ready to migrate to a new segment if the right product arrives. The analytics, features, tools offered to them gradually migrate towards productising the otherwise vast and sophisticated infrastructure needed to be a quant, an algo trader or an HFT trader.
THIS ended with our investor asking — what do you want from me.
