I'm coming off a career designing analytical apps for FCMs, hedge funds, and other financial services firms. Boiling it down, most of my work has been pretty screens and reports to analyze and rank trader performance, analyze portfolio risk in real-time, fire alerts, etc. A lot of my work has also been in the area of hedge fund administration: Keeping track of pool investors, master/feeder interactions, allocation of P/L and fees, etc. So accounting tools, in other words. Not terribly exciting stuff but it paid well. So now I can either retire or pursue another project. With that in mind, I'm trying to get a sense from the trading community if there's some software/app market niche that hasn't yet been filled -- or perhaps one that HAS been filled, but the product(s) are just too expensive for retail trader use. I was thinking of building a platform that would hook into trader accounts at IBKR and other trading firms, provide in-depth performance analysis, allow users to share their data with other site users, maintain leader boards, create funds and apply fees, etc. But it looks like FundSeeder has that game pretty well covered; and they're offering it free of charge. Anything else you personally would like to see built?
1. Any app simplifying trading into a game like experience would increase brokers' turnover. 2. Order entry with voice commands.
Interesting. I'd love to hear your thoughts on gamification of trading. One of my side projects was a futures market with contracts denominated in Bitcoin. In other words, I provided a bid/ask spread for S&P, Crude, Gold, etc. and let users margin their trades with Bitcoin instead of USD. It was a tiny exchange. Users were bored college students mainly. It generated a few thousand dollars per month (in Bitcoin) with zero advertising but quickly plateaued. After I shut it down, I asked a few users for their opinions on the site, why they didn't come back, etc. I was told that my user interface, though functional and efficient, wasn't terribly exciting. The recommendation to "gamify" the experience was made by a few people I respect, but I never was able to get a handle on exactly what it was they were suggesting.
Hey Dave - welcome to the forum. Always room for a better mousetrap. Recent case in point is the recent TOS outages described here https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/think-or-swim-issues-today-8-17-20.348896/ I must say, this week, TOS has been near perfect and after the first 5 minutes, i have seen no delays all week. But similar problems have been at TOS most all year long, to one degree or another, from time to time, especially the first 30 minutes, with charts lagging last price or last price lagging charts, frequently. I always, run Ameritrade home page on one screen with a pre-populated market snap order, in case TOS freezes. I'm not saying start your own brokerage, but a stand alone charting service (lean and fast with adequate servers - maybe AWS powered) might be well received. If i were envisioning one, I'd see it with fewer features, not more, but very reliable and fast. 1) All i would need is SMAs, but yeah most folks would want a dozen or so indicators to choose from. 2) I would want bars to be configurable in 1 second increments. TOS has tick charts, but for time, nothing under 1 minute. 3) TOS has a range of font sizes for old eyeballs. America is aging. I'd make larger fonts available. Larger than TOS. Say you eventually achieve 1000 subscribers at $20 a month. Marketing and other expense might cost you half, but you do need something to do
Perhaps you could plan for a section that showed the daily top performing traders, maybe the top ones achieving over, say .5% for the day ... or some such amount. That might be a step in the right direction. Some way for people to compare their performance with others.
1. Replacement for IB’s TWS trading platform. That one is slow/sluggish and getting oldish. Many people use other products like TDA’s ToS for charts and Option P&L graphs. I suspect that IB itself would want to replace/rewrite it if they had resources. A better trading software could be sold individually, or sold to IB in whole. LightSpeed could also be interested as they don’t have anything comparable to TWS or TDA’s ToS. Take a look at one such 3rd party product: https://dastrader.com/ 2. Something that possibly could fit with other ideas, I’d be personally interested in complex options execution solution for IB/TWS, that would work to obtain reasonable price on multiple option legs for very complex option orders, like 4-6 legs with different quantities. Potentially splitting complex combo into simpler spreads, as well as trying to get fills on individual legs while delta hedging till other legs get filled. Take a look at WEX as example: https://www.tradewex.com/Home/Execution
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