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Hey, this is Miles with TradingReviewers.com, and today we have the pleasure of chatting with the creator and founder of TrendSpider, Dan Ushman. Dan, it's a thrill to have you on. How are you today?
I'm good, Miles! Thanks for having me.
Absolutely. So, why don't we just start with some of the basics, get into your roots a little bit. How did you originally get into trading?
Sure, it's a long story. I place my first trade in 2008, which was a crazy time to start trading. I got into it because of the same reason everyone else gets into - it's a way to make money. To me, it's a game and I like to figure things out and see if I can figure out how to play this game. If I can figure out how to be successful at it. Before that though, I'd been in tech for a long time. I was a partner in a couple cloud computing companies and I think the intricacy of trading and technology - they're all very complicated things with a lot of moving parts and are difficult for most to understand. And even more difficult for most people to really understand - it's appealing.
So it started just as an interest, did you always see it as a career?
No, it's an evolution. My last company was a company called SingleHop, and when I say I first place a trade in 2008, it's not like I was a technical trader at the time. I was like everyone else: "I like this company, I'll put some money into it". If it goes up, okay maybe I'll sell it. It wasn't very informed trading. Buy my last business, SingleHop, we took something that was very manual, very slow, very error-prone - deploying physical servers in data centers and we automated it. We made it so you can press one button and the computer would pick the right hardware, deploy the server, and install the operating system. Update it, send you the password. Basically, we condensed 24 to 48 hours of work into 20 minutes. Trading became a curve for me three years ago one day while I was sitting at home, I used to take a day off to trade every once in a while. This is after I got into the technical side of things, and I'm sitting there trading or trying to trade, staring at a chart, and I'm realizing why is this manual? Why am I doing this by hand? We can deploy servers, we can land people on the moon - why does a price chart need a person to sit there and eyeball it in order to analyze it. I decided to try and see if some of the same automation principles that had worked in other businesses for me in the past would apply to technical analysis. And that's where TrendSpider was born - it was just a project by me and my CTO Russ who's also a trader. He's the developer. To see if we could automate some of the grunt work of technical analysis. So we were able to and it took us here.
So it was started to solve a problem more or less, like most good ideas...
Yeah, technical analysis is super subjective. Because of that, it's very prone to mistakes, biases, emotions, frustration - things like fear and greed. The Tweets of Elon Musk - all kinds of stuff influence your technical analysis. The human mind is an amazing machine, it can see what it wants to see no matter what it's looking at. I found in our early research for TrendSpider, we would show the same chart to 100 traders. We'd get like 98 different ideas, theories, and analysis on that. It was really hard to get consistency from a crowd. Then it dawned on us that the reason for that is everyone's a little biased. It actually varies - you show an $AAPL chart to 100 traders and you get 90 different bull cases. Other tickers, less in favor companies, you'll get a bunch of different bear cases or a mixture across the board. Bitcoin is a great example. You look at the crypto market and you pretty much have 50/50 down the road. Half the people are bearish, half the people are bullish. Everyone sees different scenarios and everyone's looking at different time frames.
Now what's really interesting to me about this is people don't like change. Especially introducing a new platform like this where it's actually changing the methods of technical trading that you had issues with at first. So was it difficult to get people to accept the platform at first?
Yes, I like to say building trading software is very, very hard. There's actually a reason why there's not a lot of new software coming out in the trading world because it's not easy. But then, changing people's way that they think about trading is completely different. And we're selling both - we're selling new software and a new way to think about charting and technical analysis. And it's been difficult, I won't lie. There's a lot of people that we talk to who love the product, you follow up with them a month later and they've gravitated back to their old ways. They'll recognize that manual is error-prone and problematic but it's so very difficult for them to make that change. We've had a lot of success though, regardless. For every person like that, there's like 20 who want more edge. And that's what trading is all about - it's about finding more edge. And people will do pretty much anything for edge, so while it's been tough to convince some, most people are really excited about it. I don't want to go and talk too much about the product because this interview isn't necessarily about the product itself, but things that really trip people up in trading are distractions and emotions. Those are two things that a tool like TrendSpider, not necessarily our tool, but a tool like it can help traders with it. And people recognize that.
Learn more about TrendSpider...
To learn more about TrendSpider and all the ways it can help you improve your trading, be sure to check out our in-depth TrendSpider review.
And clearly, people have because now you have over 4,000 traders on the platform now, and that's just from starting the company in 2016. Employees all over the world as well, so how did you actually get the word out to people?
So, the word spread organically. And that number that's on the website is a little out of date, it's more like 6,000 now. Things have been growing and actually during COVID, a lot quicker. Everybody's locked down and people are trying to find new things to occupy their time. We spend almost nothing on advertising, I think we spent like $4,000 in ads during the first quarter this year - not much at all. Mostly experimenting. It's Twitter, it's StockTwits, it's Reddit, it's traders sharing our charts. And the charts themselves, there are a lot of things in TrendSpider that I like to say are visually stunning. Certain indicators that we have, chart tools like Heatmaps and Raindrops fall into that category, and people see that and they're like, "What is this?" And that starts the conversation.
Now, what about the name TrendSpider? Where did that actually come from?
You know, funny story. Not a week goes by where I don't think about changing the name. We came up with that name when all we did was automatic trendline detection, but TrendSpider is so much more than that now and that name pigeonholes us a little bit. People come to TrendSpider and they expect the trendline stuff, but then they're shocked by the scanner, and the alerts, and the backtester. The word TrendSpider doesn't imply that. Spider is actually a technical term, for a computer program that can look through a lot of data. Google is a spider for websites, so we thought that combination would work but it takes a lot more explaining than I'd like. And actually, I'll be honest, it wasn't our original name. So we've already changed it once. When we were first beta, we called ourselves Chart Calculator. I don't want to change it again, but every week I think about it.
Do you find it really causes confusion among your customers or no?
I wouldn't say among customers, but among the media, among people who are considering being customers, I think it creates a mental caricature of the business that was accurate for a small part of it.
I was curious about this - your website actually states that you guys are the most comprehensive technical analysis software on the market. Why do? What puts you ahead of competitors.
If you talk to traders, you'll find that an average pays for five or six separate subscription services. So they pay for a charting tool, they pay for a backtesting tool, they usually use their broker for alerts, they may use a different scanner. There's a number of ones, I don't want to name drop competitors, but there's a number of companies that play in all these different areas. TrendSpider's one tool that ties all of this stuff together into one place, it requires no additional subscriptions, you only have to learn how to use one product that does everything that those products do in one place. And what makes it unique is how your scanner is integrated directly into your chart which is directly integrated into your backtester. All this stuff is connected, so you can generate a watch list off of the scan and then backtest that watch list with the backtester and create alerts and charts all in one platform. So, that's one of the reasons why we say that. The other reason is that we genuinely do cover the vast majority of everything you can do in trading. If you want Heikin-Ashi, your candles, or line charts, bar charts - all the little basics are there. And we like to say that TrendSpider is a no-compromise platform, all you do is get more stuff. You don't give anything up by switching.
Got it. So, it's clearly the features that put you guys ahead of everybody as you guys would say it. Now I noticed some interesting features on the site that you wouldn't necessarily see with a lot of other platforms - you guys have TrendSpider university, You have blogs, I also saw webinars were being offered on there. What gave you the idea to start offering content like this, educational content?
So, a few things. One is what we talked about in the beginning of our chat here, which is a lot of people have a hard time changing how they think about analysis and charts. We have to educate. So we provide a wealth of knowledge, there's actually 300 or so videos on YouTube, I've made a lot of them myself. There are webinars we hold to educate people multiple times per week. They're split off into beginner, intermediate, and advanced. In the university a library of videos, and we also give people one-on-one training which is honestly a super expensive thing for us to offer - we have to hire people to sit there and give people training. A trainer has to know the product themselves.
And who do you hire for that?
We hire traders. Almost everyone on our team, we have 17 people, only 5 of us are here in the U.S. and the rest are spread around the world. We hire traders, people who like to trade. It's turned out that the people that we hire for support very quickly end up using the platform to trade. You hire traders and you teach them to use the product and you let them teach other traders how to use it. That's how you spread the word and get people over that initial learning curve.
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Do you have a most well-received or personal favorite piece of content that you guys have put out there? I mean, it's some unique stuff.
That's two questions. The most well-received, actually I would say is our webinar from this past weekend. A lot of the content we put out is not about TrendSpider, it's about trading. One of the things we found that people really love is to learn from other traders and right now everyone's quarantined at home - I haven't left the house in like two weeks - everyone is quarantined at home and people are starved for human interaction. The events are all canceled - there's no more Trader Summit, or Chart Summit. None of that stuff is happening. So we took this past Sunday, we booked it for a whole day, we brought in some of the best traders we know and we asked them to talk about what they've learned about trading. We had eight traders come on and that was by far the most well-received piece of educational content, it's been viewed almost 9,000 times since Sunday. There were 1,000 people live at any given moment throughout the day and there were a lot of different trading styles and techniques that were presented there. Brian Shannon who is someone I have a ton of respect for, I've learned so much from Brian and I think other people here would say the same. He invented anchored VWAP which is one of the indicators in TrendSpider, we're one of only four or five platforms to have that indicator. He's writing a book about it. But it is one of the most amazing indicators out there, and his session had tons of people there who are familiar with VWAP and when you learn about anchored VWAP it blows their mind. And then you find out that TrendSpider is just one of a handful of tools that supports that. And then we had people like Rob Smith, another one of my favorite traders out there. Rob has one of the most interesting and unique trading styles out there, we've integrated his stuff into TrendSpider but he's one of those people who uses his own tools. So it was not like a TrendSpider infomercial, it was different traders talking about their experiences. That was the most well-received. My personal favorite bit of content would have to be a webinar from about a month and a half ago about our scanner when we released it because the scanner is the one feature that has completely changed my world as a trader. I can find stocks much easier than I used to before, I just love it. And also, I presented it so maybe I'm a little biased.
So when did you actually implement some of these platforms? The webinars, the blogs, and whatnot?
The webinar we've done for over a year. We used to call it the Sunday Chart Show and we used to present it like a webinar, it was every Sunday at 5:00. My partner and pal Jake would host it. And then a few months ago we decided that this is a success, people love this. We decided that we were going to open it up, so it was no longer a webinar that you had to register for but it would become a YouTube Live stream. We hired a production team, so on the background of our webinars there are three guys sitting there making sure the transitions work well, the special effects, the sound effects - we decided to take it up a notch. So if you look at it now, hundreds of people watch. There's a higher level of production value, so there's transitions, animations, sound effects, music. And we tried to mirror The Daily Show and COVID has been incredible for this - everybody's home and all the TV shows are being hosted from home. The Daily Show is being hosted from home right now.
So it doesn't look strange to do something like this...
More than that, it helps inspire us. We get to see how Comedy Central hosts a show from home and this is something we were doing before this happened, before the lockdown. This has helped us normalize it and it's helped us improve it.
And it's good marketing for TrendSpider as well, no?
It is. Obviously, we love to show the product off. We don't actually do a lot of actual marketing. The marketing we do is we post charts to Twitter, because I think the product speaks for itself. I don't think I need to have some flashy ads. When a trader logs in and creates their first alert and realizes that they can now go play golf and they're not going to miss their trade, that creates a customer for life.
Dan, you guys are always adding new features that are fun for the product. And you can find about them on the blog and on the website. Are there any new features coming up that you can tease? Can you give any insight into what might be coming out soon?
So we have a couple things that are really cool coming. I'll tell you two of them and I could talk all day about this. One of them is expanding the breadth of the platform. Right now, we're purely technical but in a few weeks we'll be launching fundamental market data, so corporate financials, earnings releases, we'll be launching corporate newsfeeds from Benzinga, and we'll be launching analyst ratings also from Benzinga which takes a purely technical platform and makes it useful for people who are fundamental. Because then you can scan and search the market for charts that look a certain way and have a certain fundamental story. And I've always believed, and this is how I personally trade, that you cannot be a one-trick pony in this game. You have to take all the information available to make your choices. So I personally find stocks based on fundamentals and I time entries and exits based on technicals, and this will enable people to do that completely from within TrendSpider. So that's a feature that's coming soon that I think will change the product in a big way.
Any idea on how soon that might be out?
Next two or three weeks, we're testing it right now. And then the big feature, this is what I think will change the world for traders. This is our early vision from when we first started this project and the one thing that we really set out to build. It's taken us three years and this will be at the end of this year, is brokerage integration. This will allow you to connect your brokerage account through TrendSpider and then automate your trading so you'll be able to backtest a strategy to see if it works, define your order ticket, tie it to a chart, and go about your life. When your trade is ready, TradeSpider will ping you on your phone and say, "Hey! Your trade is ready. Do you want to take it? Yes or no?" You can modify it if you need to, but if you say yes, it logs into your brokerage and places your trade. But then, it starts to automatically monitor all your exit conditions. So your profit takers, your risk limits, your stop losses, your trailing stops, and your technical analysis. And because fundamental and analysts data will be in there, you'll be able to say buy this stock when this moving average cross happens and then sell it if an analyst downgrades it, or their EPS goes down, or their moving average crosses back, or I've lost 2%, or I've made 10% - define it all ahead of time and go about your life. This is how professionals trade. I'm in Chicago and I know a lot of hedge fund people here and a lot of prop trading people and bank traders, this is a big finance city second to New York. Maybe third to New York and Hong Kong, who knows. But it's big here. I don't want to name names, but a friend of mine works IT at a hedge fund and they have like 10 to 1 programmer to trader ratio and this is why retail traders get destroyed because they are at a technological disadvantage and an informational disadvantage. An emotional and distraction disadvantage. This is how we change the world for them - we let them automate things the same way that the pros do it.
People like things to be as easy as possible now and that seems to be what you guys are after here, to make it as easy as possible for the trader.
Thank you for mentioning easy-of-use because it is important. Hedge funds and prop desks, the way they do this is by adding programmers. So they have a team of developers that take the strategies that traders come up with and write code to do that - they queue up those trades. Then the traders approve or decline the trades as they come up. But most individual traders couldn't write a line of code to save their life. I couldn't write a line of code to save my life. Not everybody's a developer so that's the beauty of TrendSpider, this automation I speak of, these alerts, the backtesting, the scanning, it is extremely sophisticated to the level that you would expect to have to write code to do it. But you don't. It is purely a visual interface where you can create your conditions visually and all you need to be able to do is understand trading, the terminology of technical trading. You need to know what a moving average is, what a candle is, what volume is. But if you're a trader and you already have that, you don't have to learn anything new to use TrendSpider. It is visual. You create your conditions using drop-down menus and right-clicking on things. TrendSpider then converts it into computer code, sends it to our server, which then interprets it and monitors the charts for you.
Now as part of a number of glowing reviews on your website, I noticed this, and I thought that this was fun and would be a good place to end this interview - you actually boast a glowing review from Ugly Kid Joe. Is that the rock band? Are they technical traders that I don't know about?
It doesn't look like it, that Twitter handle has like 23 followers. So all of our reviews are real, we copy and paste them from the Internet but we don't really know who a lot of these people are - it'll be Facebook users or Twitter users. But there's a lot of in-depth reviews besides our website that other people have made. I encourage people to write them. Reviews are one of the ways we actually improve a lot. Because for every review, we'll cherry-pick the best line and put it on our website. Every review we actually send to our dev team and we make them read it because there's always a few things that they point out that can be improved or that suck and can be made better. That's actually a big thing of mine - when a customer cancels I usually call them myself. I'm like, "Look, I'm not trying to sell you. I just want to know - tell me about your experience. Why did you choose to sign up? What were you looking for and why did you choose to leave?" And that feedback is how we make the product better over the years.
Yeah, that's an interesting tactic. Not something that many would do, especially from the founder of the company to call and actually use that to better the company. That's interesting.
I tell founder friends of mine, if you don't spend half of your life talking to customers, you're doing it wrong.
Right, because there seems to be this divide sometimes with the founder/CEO where they're at the top of the food chain so there's not much reason for them to talk to the customers.
I take support calls myself, I take a lot of them. A lot of the chats, I call a lot of the people that cancel. This is something that I didn't always do in my career. There was a period of time where I was a young immature entrepreneur back in my first startup in the early 2000s, and I kind of thought of customers as numbers and you become much more aware of their experiences when you talk to them and you start to learn a lot from them.
Dan, this has been an absolute pleasure. How can people keep up with what's going on with TrendSpider? What's the best place?
The best place is Twitter. Follow @trendspider on Twitter, we post a ton of charts. A lot of people follow us just for that. All our updates - everything goes on Twitter as well.
Got it, great. Dan, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure.
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*QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS?
Do you have any specific questions or comments that you'd like to ask Dan about TrendSpider? Comment below and let us know!
