Tradier at FinDEVr San Francisco 2014 - An API like never before – Do what matters and the rest is already done

Did you miss our talk at FinDEVr 2014 in San Francisco? Don't worry!

Here's the complete segment of the event with  Tradier CEO Dan Raju and SVP Product / Chief Evangelist Craig Russell presenting their talk on "An API like never before - Do what matters and the rest is already done". 

Have you ever tried to build a financial market app? It is painful and just about impossible. Too many data, trading, platform and process barriers. Tradier has done all that heavy lifting for you. An API that abstracts the pain and delivers the gain.

Dan Raju:

Hi Everybody. My name is Dan Raju, I’m the CEO of Tradier and I have our Chief Product Evangelist, Craig Russell, who’s here to make a point with me. I think what the next 5 to 6 minutes, we really hope to change the way you think you have to create retail investor applications. We really think there’s a way to create application and systems and platforms in a totally different way than how it is actually being done right now.

So I really wish that we could make that point today.

Have you tried to build a retail investor application these days? It is just about impossible. It’s almost like you start to build X, then you have to worry about doing Y. Market data is expensive. And  even if you ever get access to a good market data API, it is just about impossible to develop application in quick fashion. It is absolutely difficult. And then, you end up building a massive back office trying to manage all that data. Then you start looking at  all the API’s, there are ton of them.

How many of them are complete? How many of them have taken the time to make sure to take a look at each message, and made it simple for a developer to build it. An API has a sole purpose, the sole purpose is actually to make development easy. So we a lot of APIs, many of them are incomplete.

Now, try to offer trading to that. Or try to create the capability to create trading, it will take you months. I know clients that have taken years to do it.

You know how it feels like? It feels something like this. Right? This is how it feels to actually build an app these days. So, the amount of frustration that someone goes to, is absolutely, a difficult thing. So we set out to solve that problem. We really wanted to make it easy for people to build, great simple agile applications for the retail investor.

So, it is really, the core is, we want you to focus on creating the biggest value prop and that is to focus on the customers, and we will take care of the rest and all the heavy lifting for you. So the key is, we are getting you avoid this situation of starting half way in the path, and then getting lost about / or where we started/. We help you actually focus on the most important thing, and we take care of the rest of the heavy lifting for you.

So, what I’m gonna do, let me talk about Tradier. This is the problem we fundamentally try to solve.Tradier is a simple API that abstracts the markets into a simple REST based API. We take brokerage, trading, market data, and totally abstract that as a simple API that you can develop and focus on one thing, and one thing only - and that is development of the last mile. That is what we do. You should try it out, it will actually change the way you actually think about developing applications.  Whether its a trading app, mobile, whether you’re broker dealer, social, wearable, Google Glass, whatever it is, we have actually talked through each message, to have you build the application on top of it.

Now, if you have an idea that’s better than all of this? Go check out the API. Go and check out https://developer.tradier.com/. It is simple. It is easy. That’s the API that we set out to build. Now, let me talk about what I think are the core ingredients of what we build Tradier on.

Number 1, it is simple. Right? There is no end to simplicity, all developers here know that.

Number 2, it is free. You can just sign-up with just an email. How many brokerage APIs have you seen where you have to deposit $25,000 right? Its totally free. We have made the application and the API totally real-time, and we are a brokerage firm, security is absolutely of importance for us, and it’s absolutely super secure. So check it out. It is built by developers, all of us in the company are developers at heart, we build it so we can let the world innovate on top of us. We really have a strong eco-system, I’m going to pass it on to Craig to actually talk about the Tradier eco-system.

Craig Russell:

The Tradier API is being used by many many firms currently, and also many folks are developing to them. When we say ecosystem, this is just a small example of some of the ecosystem thats already present, and there’s much more coming. Whether you’re social media app like a Scutify, or you’re heavy technical analysis platform like an eSignal, or options analytics like LiveVol, or you’re an algo trading platform such as Algofast, that’s all been enabled by the Tradier API, on top of that there are hundreds of developers, if you’re a single developer wearing your bunny slippers in your garage coding away, the API is for you.

There 30 plus firms currently developing that are going to launch shortly with us as well. It’s an amazing ecosystem because at the end of the day, Tradier does not want to compete with you the developers, we don’t want to own that last mile to the investor, the trader, that’s what we have you guys for - you have the ideas. We just want to be the engine behind that. To help you and enable you.

The choice is really pretty simple if you’re developer. You can go and pay a lot of money for things like market data, trading capabilities, or you can come work with us, where the choice is straightforward. We have a free sandbox for you to get started with when you’re ready to go full-time. We have instant account sign-ups, streaming data, an ecosystem, with done all the heavy lifting. At the end, you don’t want to end up  here, you don’t want to end up with this crucial problem, you don’t want to be saying “ Ah geez, -  we built on something that wasn’t product ready, it’s not ready for production because it’s not real-time, it’s not streaming.”

Let’s tell the world, it’s okay. We want to make sure that we’ve really seen a quality product. What? Didn’t you think of that? Weren’t you trying to build a quality product at first?

We help with that. Tradier’s a great place to build your app, test it out and launch it, and we will help with that. Oh, by the way, the cost for transactions - not a point of friction.

Thank you.