The time of legacy online brokers is ending

Hundreds of new, innovative digital trading and investing platforms depend on Tradier, making it one of the fastest growing brokerage firms to process millions of trades and shares valued at billions of dollars. 

For decades, large brokerage firms decided how the average investor invested in the stock market. The incumbent players set the goal posts on how investors learn about the market, process market insights, consume content, perform analysis and, most importantly, they set the fees for services. With the limitations in technology, it comes as no surprise that the market is dominated by huge incumbent players such as Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, E*Trade, Interactive Brokers, and Fidelity.

Over the last seven years, however, the financial services industry has seen seismic disruption. Technology altered the landscape of investor interaction with the stock market, now enabled by the internet, and a growing movement of people seeking financial empowerment is driving the rising demand for digital investing experiences. These changes have led to the rapid unbundling of the traditional brokerage house, leaving investors seeking platforms that better suit their needs and generate better value for their cost. 

The inescapable demand for personalized experiences by online investors, paired with the inability of legacy brokers to innovate, has ushered in a new breed of platforms, apps, and services that are bringing new methods of trading, investing, and consuming content to market. Tens of millions of online investors across the globe are adopting these platforms in droves. Supporting more than 200 of these platforms is an API-focused brokerage firm called Tradier.

Tradier - the open fabric that is powering next-generation investing

Tradier was built with the goal of making markets more accessible through an ecosystem that creates more choice, lowers prices, and encourages innovation in ways the traditional players have failed to enable. The brokerage element is a burdensome yet essential component required by any trading platform that wants to connect investors to the stock market. Tradier solves this problem with its “Brokerage as a Service” offering. It offers a very rich suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) and web properties that simplify what would be years of technology, regulatory, and data hurdles for organizations trying to launch new platforms. With Tradier software, companies can build trading and investing platforms in the span of weeks instead of what traditionally required years and millions of dollars to create.

As a cloud software offering, Tradier APIs are readily available for anyone to launch investing platforms. Tradier provides an array of one-stop solutions ranging from APIs and web capabilities that enable developers to build custom trading, research, analysis, robo-advisory, and real-time data applications. Everything from account opening, funding services, portfolio management, trading, and reports are available and easy to adopt as APIs and web modules for anyone to use. Dan Raju, Co-Founder and CEO of Tradier, says “Think of Tradier as your Brokerage extension whose main goal is to enable you and see you build great investor products and succeed”.

Firms like Interactive Brokers, TD, and E*TRADE offer connectivity-based products today but are limited by challenges attempting to put API wrappers on legacy backoffice infrastructures and support structures. Most legacy brokers have huge conflicts asking trading platforms to use them as a back office when they are offering direct investor products themselves that compete with them.

Today, Tradier is the fastest growing ecosystem of connected investor applications in the market with over 200 supported platforms. More and more active traders prefer to use a Tradier connected platform rather than the legacy alternatives as they offer better value, functionality, and most importantly support.

Trade Hawk harnesses Tradier’s APIs to revolutionize active trading

TradeHawk, recently acquired by Tradier, is among the nation’s fastest growing equity and options trading platforms. Built on innovative stock and options trading technology and designed by professional traders, TradeHawk has positioned itself as a viable alternative to TD Ameritrade’s Thinkorswim, Interactive Brokers, and Fidelity. With an intuitive interface and user friendly system, TradeHawk provides retail traders with an edge in the market to stay on top of current trends and identify investing opportunities.

Today, TradeHawk has gained wide popularity in the market and is highly sought-after by active traders who perceive it as an open, customizable platform with an engaging educational interface for options traders. Powered by Tradier, TradeHawk rapidly expanded its ability to offer a seamless experience with unlimited, commission-free equity and options trading*.

This powerful combination of comprehensive trading services combined with unlimited, commission-free trading accelerated the growth and adoption of the platform. TradeHawk subscribers save thousands of dollars in monthly commissions while enjoying a holistic trading experience. TradeHawk offers order entry, order management, risk analysis, simulation, alerts, advanced and conditional orders, charting, portfolio management, and spread logs, along with other powerful tools.

Kevin "Lex" Luthringshausen, previous CEO of TradeHawk and current Head of Business Development at Tradier, says, “We at TradeHawk had a simple mission to provide the best technology, experience, and value for our traders. We are happy that by leveraging Tradier, we are able to continue offering a compelling product in the market.” 

Evati democratizes investing for everyone

Evati is a rapidly growing digital advisor. Evati has a simple mission: making saving and investing easy and accessible to everyone. CEO Pete Clemson wanted to create a product that would empower the everyday investor to balance today’s lifestyle goals with tomorrow’s financial needs.

To accomplish this, Evati needed a brokerage solution that would enable average investors to easily open an account, seamlessly fund their accounts with both large and micro deposits, and offer an intuitive portfolio experience in a scalable and secure manner.

Using Tradier’s New Account Opening API, Funding API, Account Services API, and Trading API, Clemson and the Evati team were able to create an easy-to-use, inexpensive platform tailored to empower investors of any background to achieve a wide range of financial goals.

Today, Evati offers an innovative way for casual finance dilettantes to be smart about their money. Investors of any level of experience can customize their investment goals and monitor their performance. Evati’s goal-based investing is free for the first month and then only $1 per month for accounts under $5,000 and after that a small 0.36% annual charge.

“We are excited about our growth and adoption of Evati from consumers,” said Clemson, “Tradier has been instrumental in providing essential brokerage microservices that Evati needs in order to deliver our services.”

Control your financial future with Tradier

Tradier is a unique solution designed to empower ideas. From TradeHawk’s equity and options trading platform to Evati’s robo advising platform, and many more, Tradier’s APIs can allow creative individuals to focus on harnessing the power of ideas without the hassle of piecing together the tech know-how.

Visit the Tradier Brokerage website to learn more and find a solution that fits your unique financial needs.

*Single Listed Index Options are subject to a $0.35/contract fee in addition to any other charges for exchange, OCC, and regulatory fees. See Fee Schedule for more details