Adam DeGraide:
Coming up today on David Vs Goliath.
Ran Aroussi:
The war started and essentially development pretty much altered. Some of the guys were recruited to go and fight.
Adam DeGraide:
You wake up every morning and you grab a bowl of trade and that’s what you eat every single day.
Speaker 3:
Welcome to today’s episode of David Vs Goliath, a podcast dedicated to helping small businesses leverage technology to not only help them compete against their large competitors, but win. Your host is currently the CEO of Anthem Business Software, a three-time Inc. 500 recipient, and a serial entrepreneur with a passion to help small businesses everywhere, find, serve, and keep more customers profitably. Please join me in welcoming your host, Adam DeGraide.
Adam DeGraide:
Hey, everyone. It’s Adam DeGraide from the David Vs Goliath podcast. Hopefully, everyone’s having a great day today. Today, we have Ran Aroussi from Tradologics. He’s the CEO and founder. A software company dedicated to making market trading, including crypto, easier and more effective and efficient. Should be very interesting. Today’s episode is brought to you by automatemysocial.com, where if you’re a small business, you can automate 90% to 100% of your social media, the creation of it, the strategy of it, the deployment of it, and one company even said the other day when they switched over to automatemysocial.com, they saved $48,000 a year plus benefits. Just think about that. Check it out today at automatemysocial.com. You can also visit us online at joea95.sg-host.com, then you can subscribe and apply to be on the podcast. Well, with no further ado, let’s get right into it. Ran, welcome to the David Vs Goliath podcast.
Ran Aroussi:
Hi. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.
Adam DeGraide:
Now, I always pre-record my intros, and I’m usually right about the pronunciation of the last name of my guests I would say 85% of the time. How do you say your last name?
Ran Aroussi:
My last name is Aroussi. It’s a bit hard. Yeah.
Adam DeGraide:
Aroussi. I think I did it. I think I nailed it.
Ran Aroussi:
All right. Yeah.
Adam DeGraide:
Ran Aroussi. I think I did it. We’re going to find out, when you watch it a couple weeks from now, you’ll know whether I got it right or not. It’s so funny because I love people with similar passions, and I was actually checking out your website, and on one part of it, you had the phrase, “One API to rule them all.” Clearly, a reference to the Lord of the Rings of J.R.R. Tolkien, one of the inklings from Oxford University along with CS Lewis and his fellow compadres. It was fascinating because the previous company I just sold back in 2020, the very first website that I created for that company was one system to rule them all.
Ran Aroussi:
Rule them all. Nice.
Adam DeGraide:
You have to. When something is that powerful and that good, you got to start there.
Ran Aroussi:
Exactly.
Adam DeGraide:
In layman’s terms, because obviously, when you’re dealing with software code and Python and Java and all these things, it can be lost sometimes on the average business person who’s thinking about starting a business. They get afraid of building software because they don’t understand the technology of the terms. Tell the folks what Tradologics does in very simple terminology, and then we’ll get into some more of the complexities later on.
Ran Aroussi:
Okay. You know what? Instead of telling what it is, I’ll start with an analogy from something that more people know about. Let’s take, for example, you’re a blogger and you want to start a food blog. You have two options, and 20 years ago, you only had the one. You have to write the blog post, you have to create the website, which means designs, programming, set up the server, set up the domain, do all of that stuff, and at the very end, what’s really important and the reason that people come to your website is because you have good content, right? It’s not because you set up the domain in a perfect way. If we take this analogy to the programming, to the programmatic trading world today, in order to execute a trading strategy, and it could be very simple, it could be, “I want to buy a stock that was down three days in a row because I’m expecting some bounce back.” It doesn’t have to be rocket science.
The rule itself is very simple. If it’s down three days, buy, but now you have to wear a ton of different hats. You have to fetch the data and clean it, and set up the servers and the connectivity, and monitor your position. There’s a lot of technical stuff that goes into that, but at the end of the day, you’re going to make or lose money due to your trading idea and not because of your technology. If I go back to the analogy, today’s world, you just hop into wordpress.com, wix.com or whatever, just focus on the content. You don’t really have to bother yourself with the underlying technology. We want to bring that same level of abstraction to the trading world so you can focus on your great trading idea and not about connectivity, execution, risk management, all that stuff.
Adam DeGraide:
That makes a lot of sense now. When I read your website, it says, “You focus on your algo,” which I believe means algorithm, short for algorithm, “and then we’ll take care of the rest.” It’s almost like Tradologics has built the plumbing, so to speak, to connect all of these platforms together. You can then layer on top of it your business rules that you think is your genius trading strategy, and you can set up rules like stock down three days, this percentage, buy, hold for X, wait for this, sell at Y, right? That’s the way you built the software, and so people can layer their own personal trading strategy or a company can layer its own personal trading strategy onto the backbone of your plumbing and your connectivity to the different networks to trade effectively and efficiently. Am I saying that pretty accurately?
Ran Aroussi:
You are saying it perfectly. That’s exactly the idea. We see ourselves as-
Adam DeGraide:
Again, man, I’m saying it perfectly. If you need someone in sales, I’m looking for a job.
Ran Aroussi:
Come on board.
Adam DeGraide:
I’m hired. I’m sorry, continue on.
Ran Aroussi:
Yeah, we see ourselves as an AWS type of platform that’s specifically designed for trading. We have lots of different products that, as you mentioned, you can use and layer on top of each other, just like Lego, to build your own custom-designed platform that’s right for your trading style because here it is, there’s something about building platforms like this. You cannot create an experience that isn’t obstructed just because there are so many different trading style. Some people are portfolio traders, some are insert days, some long short, some futures for crypto. There’s tons of different instruments.
There’s really no way to create one platform that will cater to all of these different trading style unless you break it down into its core components and how people can use this Lego type of architecture to build exactly what they need. It sounds maybe a bit more complex than it is, but just as you mentioned, you set up the rules. If this happens in the market, just let me know, send a ping to my strategy, and I will execute an order. Once it’s executed, Tradologics will take over, monitor your P&L, let you know if something is out of your thresholds. It’s very easy for you to just really focus on the if then part of the business and not the other technical aspects of it.
Adam DeGraide:
Yeah, it’s amazing how many different pieces of technology I’m even integrating in my new CRM software, marketing automation software. We have a lot of pipelines that have been built because the pipeline’s the biggest pain in the butt to manage. If you know what you want to do and you have a good idea for it, you layer the foundation, the plumbing, so to speak, and then you can build the pretty mausoleum on top of it to make people enjoy their experience. Now, you did mention a couple of really awesome technologies that have evolved over the years. You mentioned WordPress, you mentioned Wix, you look at Squarespace, all these, even GoDaddy’s web builder is managing the CSS, so people don’t have to worry about it anymore.
Then you have these amazing programs like Canva that have been added into the graphical world where graphic artists are contributing their talents, but an average show like Ran, an average show like Adam can still look like we’re amazing graphic artists because we are leveraging good graphic artists templates. Is that something that Tradologics is also providing? In other words, you’re not just providing the plumbing, but are you providing the drag and drop functionality to build the if then statements, or are you relying more on somebody who has that programming knowledge on the top layer, so to speak, the UI/UX world and even some of their language, whether it’s Java or Python, or C++, or whatever the case may be? Is it more a top layer-
Ran Aroussi:
It’s somewhere in between. We provide you with drag and drop interface, for example, to build pipelines. To filter down, let’s say that you don’t know which stocks you want to trade today, you just want them to follow a specific set of rules. The volume is unusually high and they had an earnings report yesterday, whatever it is, so you build your pipeline and you start with the entire CP500, and you filter it down to, I don’t know, five, 10 stocks or whatever it is. To build something like this, you’re using our drag and drop interface and all that cool stuff, but at the end of the day, when it comes to sending the data to your strategy, there is some coding that you have to do.
Now, the approach that we took is we’ll do as much for you as possible, but at the end of the day, you’re the one to have to make the trading decision proactively. We do not want to, based on your rules, just send an order and take control over your money. We just don’t want that to happen. We’re going to give you as much information as possible for you to make the trading decision, and then you can send your order. You do need to still do some coding, but your code base is about 2% of what it used to be just because we take care of all the other stuff.
Adam DeGraide:
Set up a thousand lines of [inaudible 00:10:52] you’re writing 20 lines of code instead of a thousand because you’ve already written the other.
Ran Aroussi:
Yeah, definitely.
Adam DeGraide:
That’s great. Ran, we’re going to take a break from our first corporate sponsor here on David Vs Goliath, but stay tuned, you’re with Ran from Tradologics and handsome host, Adam DeGraide, from the David Vs Goliath podcast. Here’s a very important message from Automate My Social, leveraging technology to save thousands. We’ll be right back.
Speaker 3:
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Adam DeGraide:
We’re back with the guy who eats trading for a living, Ran from Tradologics. There’s no doubt about it. You wake up every morning and you grab a bowl of trade and that’s what you eat every single day. Now, I love to talk about people when we talk about business because it’s one of the five pillars. You’ve got plans and goals, you’ve got the right people, you’ve got the right technology, you have the right process, your people are using these tools in technology, and then you have courage to start your own business. One of the things I thought was fascinating when I was reading on your website here a little bit about preparing for this because I do, believe it or not, I’m not just another pretty face. I actually spend time to read about-
Ran Aroussi:
It is a pretty face.
Adam DeGraide:
Oh, it’s so pretty it makes myself sick. It’s like Echo, a narcissist. I don’t know if you know anything about those Greek gods. I stare at myself in the reflection and go, “Oh, you’re so beautiful.” No, I don’t do that. Anyway, it talked about how you are currently leveraging some of your people resources in Ukraine, and you started a company during a world global pandemic, whether or not you believe there was a plandemic. Sorry, I didn’t mean to say plandemic. I’ll get banned off if I say the wrong thing. Pandemic or not. There was still a pandemic and we all get screwed by it no matter what it was, and then you couple that now with the fact that a part of your team is in Ukraine. That seems like a lot of headwind for you. Talk to the folks a little bit about the structure of your team, some of the challenges you’ve had starting during a world pandemic, and then continuing now working with people that are in the middle of a crisis themselves.
Ran Aroussi:
Yeah. I actually started the company while I was still living in Israel, and I’ve been in London for the past two years and a little bit more than that. I started the company when I was in Israel and I was looking to hire a team that will be around my time zone. I wanted a fully remote company and I was looking for good talent from pretty much the same time zone in Ukraine and Israel using exact same time zone. This was a very nice go-to. I searched for those outsourcing companies and reviewed their codes and found one that looked great, but after a few months of working together, we formed a deeper partnership and they became fully integrated into the company. Then once I moved to the UK, again, right in the middle of the height of the pandemic and the lockdowns and everything, so we had to go through that, and once this was over and this was finally a time for us to actually get together and meet each other in person, something that we’ve never done, the war between Russia and Ukraine started.
Adam DeGraide:
You still haven’t met them in person?
Ran Aroussi:
Oh, yeah. I never met them in person. No. The only two guys I’ve met in person are the ones that I’ve known previously, and they’re working based in Israel. Yeah, so the war started, and immediately, it really took a toll. Essentially, development pretty much altered completely for a sustained period. All our schedule was pushed month after month after month with no end in sight. Some of the guys were recruited to go and fight. Some of the guys volunteered to take care of their community and their town, and were in charge of providing supplies and getting their families out of main areas where there was were bombings.
Yeah, it was a really, really rough period. It’s by no means over, but currently, it’s sad to say, but it’s gotten used to that new normal where they have scheduled blackouts for about eight to 10 hours a day just to conserve energy, so they’re using mobile data. Thanks, Apple, for the long battery life on their new laptops, so they’re able to do some work just to both in order to make progress and in order to forget a little bit about what’s going on around them and just focus on work.
Adam DeG