Another differentiator is a strong focus on partnerships. To provide a seamless experience between customers and Tradier, Tradier works hand in hand with each partnering platform, allowing advisors running their own software. They aim to basically be a high-touch solution for businesses who want to engage in building financial tech services within their products or platforms.
“Then [regarding] the adviser [aspect], it gets even more high-touch because that’s very different. We are a broker-dealer and those advisers work hand in hand to come up with good solutions.”
Tradier’s business model
Tradier offers trading on a lot of different securities. Jason states that they include anything that’s listed on the US exchange, which is over 900,000 securities. They trade heavily in options due to competitive pricing, and right now they’re doing hundreds of thousands of contracts a month in trades.
The platform offers users many capabilities:
- Management of user and account data (e.g., fetching details on balances, positions, activity, and orders using a user or account number)
- Watchlists to let users keep track of their interests
- Streaming of events to provide live updates to market data in real time
- Trading on simple and complex equity and option orders with simple request payloads
- Real-time market data through HTTP request/response, which includes equity and option quotes, chains, expirations, strikes, and tick-based time and sales
- Historical data for the past five days, as well as a long-term history
The pricing does vary, though. Discounts are available on the platform by working with the partners:
“We offer straight-forward commissions on equities and options at $3.49 and .35 cents a contract. We’re seeing a lot more customers use our subscription-based pricing, which is flat rate price where you can trade any amount of equities or options.”
Focus on high loads and speed
Tradier executes nearly 300 million API calls per month, which is a few hundred thousand transactions per hour across two different products—just under 150 platforms have signed contracts with them. Over last year, they had about 200–300% growth, and every partner that comes online is adding a lot more value. To keep up with this growth and engagement, they use improved architectures driven by AWS comprising over 50 servers/services. Jason states that Amazon is a key partner of Tradier, as it’s fully compliant with SEC/FINRA guidelines.
Also, Jason explains that they’ve been moving the systems to auto-scaling groups, though most of the company’s sustained growth is long-term.
“As most of our platforms come online we’re scaling the system up, so we [don’t] have to scale new systems on a daily basis. We’re scaling usually for weeks or months, and it makes it much more predictable from a billing perspective.”
To ensure a quick response, the platform itself was essentially coded for performance.