| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Money Tree Investing Podcast. |
| 0:04.8 | Stock market, wealth, personal finance, value stocks, invest in your life. |
| 0:11.2 | Hello, Smart Money Tree Podcast listeners. |
| 0:13.0 | Welcome to this week's show. |
| 0:13.9 | My name is Kirk Chisholm and I'll be your host. |
| 0:16.0 | So today I'm joined with John Bartleman. |
| 0:18.4 | How are you today, John? |
| 0:19.3 | Doing great. |
| 0:20.0 | Thanks for having me. |
| 0:20.8 | Awesome. Well, we brought John on because a lot of interesting stuff going on in the markets and wanted to get his take on it. John, maybe you could tell us a bit about your background. I'm the CEO, a president's CEO of Trade Station Group. We're an online broker dealer catering to the uprend of the market, highly active traders and institutions. I've been working |
| 0:38.4 | with Trade Station for about 26 years. I joined in 99 after five years working at Franklin Templeton, |
| 0:43.9 | so I've been in the markets for a long time. I actually joined Trade Station back when they were |
| 0:47.1 | a software company. It was called Omega Research in Miami. We were a publicly traded company at the time. |
| 0:51.9 | We developed software to backtest your ideas before you put your money to risk. It was one of the earlier platforms for that in the first retail charting platform. So being part of an evolution from that to within a year being here, we acquire a broker dealer, change our business model, learn how to build out a broker dealer. I was on the product management side, actually building out these capabilities. And then, you know, being acquired by Monix Group in 2011, they took us out of the market, brought us private, become part of a global enterprise. It's been a great learning experience, you know, building products for the Asian markets. I took over CEO in 2016. So we're doing this for the last several years. It's been an unbelievable experience, you know, being at a company this long and being through the generations and now taking it sort of the next level. I've always been fascinated with Trade Station. When I first started trading, when I was in college, started using TD Ameritrade. Sorry, it was a Maritrade back then. And that was the first one I used. Actually, the first one I used was Schwab. And then I realized, like, they're charging me $35. I'm like, yeah, let me try. Ameritrade. It's only $10. I started, like, messing around. And I have a bunch of friends that became traders, started working with them. And then they became full-time traders of their own money. And most of them use Trade Station. I always wonder, like, what is it about Trade Station? I don't want to turn this into a sales pitch. But, like, there's so many different choices out there now, and maybe everything's just commoditized. But what was different about Trade Station from these other platforms? Because some other platforms had good technology, too. No, I think it really was the fact that we were the first |
| 2:17.7 | main platform that worked on allowing you to backtest with, you know, English-like statements. So it's really a Pascal-based language, but it was fairly simple for a non-programmer to learn how to back-test their trading. And this was a day you have to connect your market data and, you know, plug it all in, manage all this was a nightmare, but at the time it was state of the art. Now, like you said, |
| 2:35.3 | you've got fintechs galore everywhere, pop up. and, you know, plug it all in, manage all this. It was a nightmare. But at the time, it was state of the art. |
| 2:51.7 | Now, like you said, you've got fintechs galore everywhere popping up with the amazing ideas. But back then, there weren't a lot of choices. So if you wanted to be professional, you know, and really treat this as a business, you had to perfect and optimize your strategies. And we allowed you to not just test them, but automate them. So for a lot of professional traders and hedge funds that were starting out, |
| 2:54.7 | it was a great platform to get started. And then you graduate off generally and build your own models and get more professional. Okay, that makes sense. It's funny, |
| 2:59.2 | because I've asked people this in the past and nobody could explain it properly. But that actually |
| 3:03.9 | makes a lot of sense because that was one of my one of the challenges that I |
| 3:07.8 | come up with over the years is I've got this idea I want to back test it. How do I do it? And automating it's a totally different level. I'm not sure I can feel comfortable with that because you know, I like my money and I want some computer running wild and make mistakes. And I'm sure it's fine, but to me, that's a risk I'm not |
| 3:24.8 | willing to take. But the back testing, I think, is important. Does that only work for equities? Does it work for options and futures? Or us directly, it's basically specialized for futures, equities, FX. We used to have an FX business. We'd since got out of that. But that's really was designed for. we never really worked well with options. But I can say now, like I said, there's dozens and dozens of really amazing fintech platforms out there that specialize in options backtesting. And they do it not, you know, basically no code. I mean, it's really pretty incredible ways to backtest your software. A lot of these types of platforms are plugged into trade stations so you can use us as a broker, but you're using those platforms of your analytics. And that's sort of the way I've seen the world shifting is that there's so many players in the barriers to entry are pretty small. So for Trade Station to continue to compete in that space, it doesn't make sense. I can't keep up with them. So we focus on being the better broker. And now we should |
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