Drew Katz - Wall Street to Web3: Monoquant Unlocks Institutional-Grade Trading For The Masses

Full transcript: Drew Katz on London Real

3:20 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Drew Katz, the veteran trader, fintech disruptor, and blockchain innovator.

3:40 You are the founder and CEO of MonoQuant, the first no-code trading platform designed to bring institutional-grade tools to everyday investors. MonoQuant is a powerful trading engine designed specifically for crypto that blends automation, simplicity, and transparency. You empower users to build, test, and execute data-driven strategies without writing a single line of code. Your goal is to democratize trading by giving users access to the same predictive power, once only available to banks, hedge funds, and market makers.

4:14 Ultimately, you believe that MonoQuant is the future of trading, opening the door to new markets and new generations. Drew, welcome to London Real.

4:22 Drew Katz: Thank you for having me.

4:23 Brian Rose: Great to have you here. I want to start by saying that MonoQuant is one of our portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures, the world’s first media-powered investment firm, where our mission is to transform the world by investing in cutting-edge Web3 and AI companies while giving our partners marketing exposure across the London Real media platforms andmies.

4:42 We heighten awareness, create customers, and build communities by leveraging our global audience and extensive network. Drew, we are beyond excited to be part of this journey with you. So, let’s jump in. What is MonoQuant?

4:58 Drew Katz: MonoQuant really is the first truly no-code strategy builder.

5:03 You can do all of your portfolio analytics, reporting, etc. automatically, but there are other platforms that do that. What really makes us special is the no-code strategy builder and all the data that’s tied in. So, you know, whether it’s an indicator, an arithmetic, or all of the alternative data that you know you normally see just on website It all becomes actionable. So any data, any metric on any asset class, it all is actionable by a drag and drop node.

5:30 Think of a flowchart or a Figma. It’s that easy.

5:33 Brian Rose: I remember when you demoed this to us on the Zoom call, and I couldn’t believe what I was watching, because literally, like you said, it was drag and drop, and you want to pull this data from here and this data from here, and it just had everything in this beautiful flowchart, and at the end of it you said, and if this is too complicated for you, you can copy trade one of our many other proprietary traders and treat trade with their algorithm.

5:57 And I, and this is coming from a guy with a seasoned trading background, and I just thought to myself, wow, how come no one’s done this before? This was a no-brainer for us.

6:07 Drew Katz: I feel like there’s a variety of reasons why no one’s done it before, but I think from what I’m hearing around the industry is, we’re certainly not the only ones trying to do it, but we are the only ones that have succeeded with some of the aspects of it where other people have not.

6:24 But you can do copy trading. We have sample models, and we have lots of tutorials, as well as we are working on more educational pieces. Same things that we did with FX. Like, you know, I used to teach courses on the ICE exchange way, way, way back in the day. Same things with FX.

6:41 Brian Rose: You know, the biggest one of the biggest barriers with crypto is education. The more people understand it, the more people can adopt it. You have a great quote where you said, “If you can read a chart, you can build a trading model. And if you can’t read a chart, you can copy verified traders with transparent results.” One of the missions of MonoQuant is to take what used to be this proprietary knowledge inside these hedge funds out in Connecticut back in the day and allow, you know, normal crypto sometimes people new to the market and degens access to those tools.

7:11 That’s what you’re trying to do, right?

7:13 Drew Katz: Yeah. I mean, you don’t have to code or anymore if you don’t have much time, whatever it is. You can literally, what you look, what you makes you decide if you want to buy it. Michael Saylor, who I think was a guest on this show, if he’s, you know, buying, you can copy trade him via Arkham if you want to play, you know, one of the other providers.

7:33 Where your you know, outflows of BlackRock, whether data, you name it, any data you can think about, usually we have them now as a drag and drop, and you can take any data point, any arithmetic, and you can just drag and drop, connect it, and what’s really my favorite thing is you segregate entry and exit logic. So normally your exit logic is a trailing stop or a stop-loss. This one is exit logic. So the same way that you can define an entry with any arithmetic, any indicator, any data, you can do the same thing on an exit logic.

8:08 So flash crashes, all these different things that are typically not available in algorithms, or if you’re a manual trader, you’re not able to do unless you’re sitting at your desk for 24 hours, which is what’s really hard, because you never know when it’s coming. This allows you to capture that. And, you know, it’s fully automated. So that’s for me the most exciting things.

8:28 Brian Rose: You mentioned flash crash, because we see this all the time in crypto, where the price just spikes down, often times spikes back up, and if with a traditional stop-loss, like you’re out of that trade.

8:38 Whereas if you’re a human at the terminal at the time, you can almost see that it looks like a flash crash. And so you can actually program that into the algorithm to just be on the eye and the lookout for things that don’t make sense.

8:51 Drew Katz: It’s, yeah. If you’re looking at a screen, the flash crash is pretty obvious for the most part. And as long as you know that this asset class is good for five years from now, you could ignore the flash crash.

9:02 It’ll bounce back in due time. So instead of having the noise, you know, because the noise could be, you know, in crypto 3 to 5% easily kills your in a stop-loss. Is when you can define your logic of maybe without x amount of red candles, you know, simultaneously you don’t exit, so the noise is ignored, and so unless it really crashes again, you stay in it, and you have a pretty risk-averse strategy.

9:29 Brian Rose: You know, just buy flash crashes, and is flash crashes something that happens in crypto like 20 times more than any other market?

9:37 Drew Katz: Right? Oh god, it happens every week. It’s unfortunately way too common. This, it’s, it’s a very, very volatile market, but that’s why we needed exit logic, because there’s, there’s so much volatility, and even when you were right, you were wrong, and it’s really hard to define. Is the normal stop-loss 1%?

9:53 But sometimes it’s 10%, and it doesn’t make sense to sell it, cuz it’s just a flash, and you know, that’s kind of why we took that approach.

10:00 Brian Rose: All right, talk to me about crypto, because look, I started on my trading on a trading floor in 1993. I was 22 years old. I was working at Bankers Trust, and I was trading this big fixed income derivatives book. Started on the swap book and moved to other exotic books.

10:14 And so the first day they literally handed me two phones, cuz everybody had two phones back in the day, and they said, “This button goes to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where you’re going to trade Eurodollar futures. This button goes to the Board of Trade, where you’re going to trade bond futures. This squawk box is for the guys down there 100 feet away, and this is how you trade your Treasury notes. 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 30 years. Go.”

10:36 And I was just like, “What are you guys talking about?” And everybody’s shouting down things. On top of that, I had derivatives brokers that were shouting down on speakers. And I got a real good education over the next few years of what it was like to trade fixed income markets. Okay.

10:50 And that was a little crazy, but that’s nothing compared to crypto markets. Now, you said you had a background in FX and probably a bunch of other things. How can you explain to people how these markets differ? FX, stocks, fixed income, to crypto? And you clearly, you clearly love what you see in crypto.

11:10 I guess you see a bunch of just all this opportunity, but they’re so different, because MonoQuant’s design for crypto. So you’re kind of an OG guy. You’ve been around, and I think a lot of the younger guys in crypto look to the guys with a little gray hair, you know. So tell me, because you’ve been running these models, you know, for decades.

11:30 Drew Katz: What I love the most about these models is the price action.

11:34 There’s always movement. So, you know, you look at equities, they don’t move a fraction in general over the year as much as crypto can move in a week. And if you want a good analogy for more of the gray hair people, if you look at what was it, 2010, when we had that say bank, I don’t want to say their name. There was a fat finger accident, and the market flash crash, like, massively didn’t matter. I was a derivatives trader then.

12:01 I actually was listening to the squawk box, the outcry, and I remember my father saying there’s no good chaos, or some something like that. So I was like, short, and it was a, it was a great trade. But that type of price action I see every week in crypto. Right? So, that was the S&P, like gapping down and went back up because of a fat finger.

12:20 Somebody put it in order a few points off. I shorted the derivatives products. I shorted the E-mini with the max leverage I was allowed to, and my broker, my, I couldn’t exit it. My broker called me. He’s like, you know, you’re up 69 handles, and 79, whatever, something stupid.

12:37 Never ever going to make a trade like that in the real market. And it was like a big figure. You know, if you made eight handles on a trade back in the day, you were, you were great. You know, they never, ever, ever had anything like that in a split in like less than a minute. And he’s like, “Do you want to exit?”

12:51 I was like, “Sure. Market order.” I was like, “Just take it right off wherever it is. It’s great.”

12:56 Brian Rose: That’s good discipline, too.

12:58 Drew Katz: I’ve never had a broker that excited and shocked that I made that much on it in 30 seconds. I was like, “This is the best trade of my life. This is, no, I mean, crypto is a little different beast, but like in the traditional market. So, you, I will never beat that.

13:12 Brian Rose: I hope he took you to the next game.”

13:14 Drew Katz: My bonus was not appropriate for my win. We could say that.

13:18 Brian Rose: All right. So we were, so we were kind of talking about traditional markets. The volatility there is a fraction of what you see in crypto.

13:26 And so when you see in crypto, there’s just so many opportunities, because there’s so much volatility and so many gaps and so many price discrepancies. This is why you wanted to focus MonoQuant on the crypto market.

13:39 Drew Katz: I love the price action in crypto. There’s always movement. There’s so much, you know, opportunity.

13:45 And as long as you trade coins that are legitimate projects that will stand the test of time, you don’t have to worry about it, you know, flashing, zeroing out, and not coming back, you know. So, if you just trade what I would refer to as the majors, same way, you know, in FX, you have the majors. So, you know, take the top 30, 40, 50,100 projects, you know, as long as they have, you know, real tech behind it, and you trade them, you should be fine. Okay.

14:11 But the more the market ages, the more it respects technicals and all these types of indicators.

14:17 Brian Rose: Okay, this has been a pretty crazy year for crypto. Obviously, you know, Trump was elected, we saw new highs. Then we saw some crazy lows on the back of maybe some tariff stuff. Then we saw a brand new high last week.

14:31 I mean, is this an amazing time to be trading?

14:34 Drew Katz: It’s a great time to be trading intelligently. Intelligently. Try to limit your emotions. Don’t be too greedy, which is sometimes something I have with my discretionary book, which is why I try to rely more on the algorithm stuff, because I’m always looking for that extra point.

14:52 Even if I get in at the like absolute bottom, like I was able to load up on some Solana at like 97, 98. Ooh, wow. So I was very happy about that. That was like February or something. It was around Febru February, March.

15:09 Yeah, I remember when that crossed the 100 mark, and yeah, I got rid of them. Everybody talks about buying then, but nobody actually buys then. I literally got rid of my Miami car coincidentally the week before, and I was just like, I’m going to buy as much as I physically am allowed to buy at this time, and I think was buying from like 97 up to 107, just fully unloaded.

15:29 Brian Rose: Okay. And you traded your car for Solana?

15:31 Drew Katz: I basically traded a car for Solana. Was pretty happy about it. It was a good deal.

15:36 Brian Rose: But even you are human enough and smart enough to realize that your own emotions can cloud judgments. And that’s why trading is such a difficult thing.

15:45 And I try to explain this to people. I sat next to guys on Wall Street. And I always compare them to those bears you see in the wild, that are the older bears that have these scars all over their face, because they made it through all the tough times. And these prop traders on the floor that are like in their 50s. You walk by them, and they got this air about them, and they’re a little gruff.

16:05 But towards the end of the day, if you’re nice to them and you bring them a coffee, they’ll sit you down and maybe give you some tips, but they’ve been through it, and they’ll be the ones that tell you, you know, the trend is your friend, and all those things, for Market Wizards, right? And, you know, don’t get emotional about stock. Gordon Gekko line, right? But it really is a battle with your own emotions. It’s fear and greed on a a minute-by-minute basis.

16:24 And that’s why most new traders fail, right? You could be 100% right, and if you’re too greedy, you could end up losing money, and then you start freaking out, and then you take an unlevered trade that you lost money in, and you’re like, “Let me leverage a trade.” And then you’re like, “Oh, wait. Maybe I’m going to add more money and leverage another trade.” Now, instead of losing a couple thousand dollars, you’re out 20 grand or 200 grand, whatever.

16:49 You know, you’re playing with millions. I don’t know.

16:52 Drew Katz: And, yeah, that’s why I love the algorithms. It eliminates all of that stuff, but because it’s node-based, normally with an algorithm, you’re kind of stuck in a box, versus a node-based algorithm, all of that artistry that, if you remember back in the day, that’s what trading used to be, somewhat of an art. At least that’s what they told us.

17:10 Yeah. It allows you to see what do you see on the chart, and it’s easy to quantify that because it’s drag and drop. You don’t have to like try to convert. It’s literally as easy as it can be.

17:19 Brian Rose: Wow, this is amazing.

17:20 Okay, so they always say 95% of crypto traders lose money because they probably get emotional and they’re so new to the game, they probably make all the newbie errors. MonoQuant, you’ve literally created it to just save all of these people, right? And if they, if they don’t know how to do it, you can copy someone, but like you said, you can drag and drop and literally see what you’re doing. You can see what the experts are doing. And it’s specifically built for crypto.

17:43 Drew Katz: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s specifically built for, you know, like volatility expansion, very aggressive markets. So, you know, a lot of my background was FX and derivatives. So, that’s kind of what I was expecting crypto to be. It is kind of like that, in my opinion, just a more fast version of that. You know, it’s just a little bit quicker, a lot bit quicker.

18:05 But that’s really what it is. So, you know, our systems do work in crypto, and that’s where we’re focused right now. But in the background, we also have all the data and are working on more, so from regulatory stances, to be able to work into the traditional markets. But it’s going to be the same thing. The traditional markets need systems like this where you can keep up, because discretionary trading is becoming a lot harder, and you know, markets are, you know, extending their hours across the board.

18:33 So you can’t just be on and off like back in the day. There’s the, the bell isn’t just the end of it. It’s there’s extended hours and extended hours, and each, you know, year it seems to keep going. So the days of the human-only trader are, are becoming extinct. Yeah.

18:48 I remember back when I was literally still at the funds, they were like, you know, making, you know, like are you a quant trader, or are you becoming an execution trader? They were like killing off the prop traders, which is, was made no sense to me, cuz like those are the guys that understand the market. Like, that’s great that you can program stuff, but if you don’t know the actual market, that’s where you’re going to have issues. And I think, I think that’s the MonoQuant edge that we have over companies.

19:15 Is there other people building systems. And one of the reasons maybe they’re failing is because no one in there, you know, building it was an actual trader. Yeah. Uh, they were quant guys only. So you don’t understand all of the nuances of the actual trader.

19:30 You didn’t actually trade.

19:31 Brian Rose: Right. So let me translate what Drew is saying. So they hired me from MIT, because they wanted me to price their derivatives models. And so you do all this quant, you know, you run all these algorithms, and then you say, “Look, I’ve got the strategy to make money.”

19:44 And the model is telling you what to do. Meanwhile, there’s the guy on the floor who’s been around for 10 years or 20 years. He’s placed the bets. He’s seen the crazy things happen, the black swan events, and he knows sometimes a lot better than you. And so when the model’s telling you this thing, he can look at you and say, “Bro, you’re about to make a big mistake.

21:01 London Real promo: See you in the Investment Club.

21:03 Brian Rose: And so he’s usually the guy that throttles back the model from making some big mistakes. And I guess what you’re trying to say is if you try to go all quant, you’re going to get into some dangerous territory and maybe even completely break the bank. You need some of that old-school knowledge or some of those old prop trading guys, and you bring that on MonoQuant to the masses.

21:26 Drew Katz: If, if you’re a quant and you’re succeeding, you’re usually a very special guy, and you know there are some funds, like, you know, especially traditional, that are amazing at it, and but you know, that’s not a very large population.

21:40 Okay. For the average person, you can hop on to MonoQuant and just build a strategy. You back test it. If it doesn’t, you know, maybe you want to make a little bit better risk, you can use the LLM. Then you back test again, and then when you’re happy, you paper trade it and eventually go live.

21:56 Brian Rose: LLM is the learning language model. Let’s talk about AI, because I remember in the demonstration you were like, yeah, you can plug in AI here and different types of AI. And again, this is such a new technology. I’d say most of your old trading models don’t even know how to incorporate it, but you incorporate it with drag and drop. How important is it to have an LLM and AI components in your model these days?

22:19 Drew Katz: I think the LLM just gives more for people who need more help, whether it’s, you know, explaining what this indicator does. And eventually what we’re working on is to say, you know, okay, maybe do this to fix your risk, fix your alpha, and then it can add that node for you. That’s what that’s for. And then in terms of AI, there’s lots of stuff. We have, I think, 38 plus different AI models that you can run for your strategies and whatever, you know, assets you want.

22:54 But then we also have AI optimization, where it’s literally going to run, I don’t even know the numbers. It’s, you know, thousands of different variations with each one of your nodes. So each one of whatever you set up, indicator, arithmetic, and run all these different variations, and then tell you, okay, this was the best result out of you know, however many thousands or millions of variations it’s run. So for those people who don’t know how to, you know, really dial in what they want, maybe they don’t have the trading experience, you run optimization, and, you know, does all the work for you.

23:24 Brian Rose: Wow. A lot of people trading crypto only look at crypto, and I remember looking at your model and you were pulling all sorts of other data in there. You know, S&P and NASDAQ and sometimes all this other esoteric data. Can you just speak on that a little bit, about how maybe in the crypto industry people are so focused in on, like you said, the top 50 cryptos, when there is potentially a lot of the data you want to pull into a.

23:47 Drew Katz: There’s so much, you got to realize everything’s like the butterfly effect.

23:51 Everything is related. So, like, anything happening, and back in the day when we traded derivatives, you had moon phases, weather data. Now, I mean, and that’s pretty obvious how that affects commodities and affects the entire market. Nowadays, you have, of course, that, but you have wallet action. You have, you know, Trump making an announcement.

24:11 You know, he, I, he bought a hamburger with Bitcoin right before his inauguration. And for me, I was like, Trump’s signing off that he approves of crypto. And I bought a lot of crypto that day, and I was like, before the moment I saw that you know tweet, and people didn’t really understand it, but again, there’s a lot of hidden messages across so many things, that we, so we take all of this amazing alternative data, like Arkham, Nansen, Parseek, Polygon, which is traditional data, and we make it an actionable node, and that’s you know, one of the things.

24:44 So sometimes some of the data is just on a website, or, you know, maybe an alert. We put it in there as an actual trading indicator, just like you would have, a Bollinger or an RSI.

24:56 Brian Rose: Wow. How do you set yourself up with a Trump buys a hamburger with a Bitcoin node? Is it like a special news event, and it can like trigger an indicator that you…

25:06 Drew Katz: Yeah. Yeah. You can have him be something with, you know, I’m not sure what day one is, but we have, you could be tracking social media. So, you know, Elon Musk makes his tweet about something crypto-related, and maybe you want to look into buying that coin because he made that comment. Michael Saylor.

25:23 There’s a lot of, you know, notable names that if they talk about this project, it is likely to have a, you know, bullish or possibly bearish sentiment. I mean, if Jim Cramer says, “Buy this coin,” I would probably sell it.”

25:36 Brian Rose: That’s the joke in crypto, is that Jim Cramer is the opposite indicator. Is it really just in crypto?

25:42 Drew Katz: Yeah, maybe it’s everywhere.

25:44 Yeah, I got that’s a good question. I see it everywhere in crypto, and the Yeah, whenever he is bullish on crypto, it tends to do the opposite, or and vice versa. He has had this effect for 20-some years.

25:54 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think you’re right. He’s a crazy man.

25:56 I do respect the hustle, though, for sure. It’s interesting what you said about Trump and the burger, because Saylor was on stage yesterday at the Bitcoin conference, and someone asked him about memes, and he said, “Look, I could write a book about Bitcoin. No one’s going to read it.” He said, “I can give an hour-long presentation on stage about treasury strategy, .1% people are going to watch it, but if I sit there and say there is no second best, that thing can go viral.”

26:21 Or he said, if baby Saylor, this is like the thing now is going viral where these babies say the same things that the older people say. He said, if baby Saylor, which is like a 2-year-old in a suit, says there is no second best, he said that alone can move the price more than me saying I bought an extra 4 billion of Bitcoin last week. So that’s a real thing, isn’t it?

26:41 Drew Katz: Yeah. Certain people have like certain powers, and like, I, I don’t think people look into how much there is behind it.

26:48 Someone of his stature buying crypto, you know, or using crypto to buy a hamburger. He doesn’t need to use a Bitcoin to buy a ham. He could use cash. He’s in New York. He could use a credit card.

27:00 I mean, his driver probably has enough money to buy the restaurant. But like, you know, it was a very, very much a statement. He bought it with that to show I approve of crypto. And maybe that was the sign-off that crypto needed to be behind him and with him, because look, he got in office, and look what he’s doing. He’s pushing the industry, and maybe he wants to push, you know, some stuff back to the United States.

27:25 But that was a humongous thing in my head.

27:27 Brian Rose: Yeah. No, it was big. All right. We’ve talked about democratizing this automated trading and getting it to the masses.

27:34 Something you want to talk about a lot is actually owning the stack and the fact that you guys build the infrastructure, and it gives you performance over everything. How important is it that you do that? Because a lot of people see models out there that don’t actually own their stack.

27:50 Drew Katz: Owning your own infrastructure is pretty much the most, is probably the most important thing. You know, it’s like your engine, your car.

27:58 And we don’t just own our stack. We actually did all the architecture ourselves. One of the most prolific server people, if you will, in the world has become our CIO. Think somewhat of a legacy-type project for him, and he did our architecture and got us the infrastructure, you know. So if you were to run our infrastructure, it would be, you know, anything compatible would be minimum 145 million a year.

28:24 You know, think about renting a sports car versus owning it. You know, we need to spend two $3,000 a month or two $3,000 a day. It’s pretty much the same types of economics. And also, you know what’s in there, and you can verify it and control it, as opposed to renting someone else’s model and you don’t really know what’s going on there.

28:44 Brian Rose: Well, yeah, someone, you know, renting it, they could literally shut you down because you pull too much data or whatever.

28:51 Drew Katz: Ours, we are in complete control. We have our own, all of our own, servers. We own our own Solana nodes. We own everything internally. We can literally put our hands physically on our servers and touch some of our exchange partners.

29:06 So, we are literally that close. And we have lots of, you know, OG infrastructure guys who have been doing this for some of the biggest names, like Dropbox, Call of Duty, these types of guys, you know, running our systems, making sure everything is polygon as smooth as possible, and making sure, because that, you know, your engine needs to work. Yeah.

29:27 Brian Rose: Talk to me about, you use that, because you don’t charge users upfront, right? So people can just jump in and start using that.

29:34 You don’t actually charge for your model.

29:36 Drew Katz: No, that was one of the biggest barriers I had. And you know, if you’re trading with, you know, with a company, who cares if there’s like 2, three,000, $4,000 a month for a terminal like Bloomberg, or whatever. But for something that’s like, you know, prosumer, you know, retail, whatever, you know, this is an institutional-grade product, but retail-friendly, so anyone can use it. I thought having those types of fees like most of our competitors does is such a barrier.

30:04 So since we own all of our infrastructure, we charge zero fees to the user. So whether it’s, you know, to build any type of model, you know, we make money on the back end. We don’t, we’re not really concerned with charging them. We just want them to trade and do well. We’re trying to democratize the industry.

30:22 Brian Rose: It’s powerful, man. It’s powerful, because a lot of people won’t jump in when there’s an upfront cost, and then they won’t play with your model, and they won’t see how valuable it is. And the premiums are okay for a while, but yeah, very big smart move. You talk about transparency, where a lot of places, if you come in, you’re kind of pushed into using their parts of their model or these systems, but for you, you want everything to be visible. People can drill down, they can see the data, they can see everything.

30:48 You want to do, just talk about how important that is, and transparency, one of the biggest issues in this market, for instance, if you’re copy trading, there’s a lot of people, and I’m sure any crypto person has seen this on Twitter, Telegram, Discord, you name it: a guy that’s made like 6,000% in a month, but he’s charging $30, $200, whatever it is per month for his course. It doesn’t really make sense. If you’re getting these types of returns, why are you even telling anyone about it?

31:16 Drew Katz: Yeah. So, you know, for copy trading, all of our stuff is basically internally audited for everyone to be safe. Transparency-wise, you know, we make everything super easy. So a lot of competitors, you want to add a MACD or a Bollinger or RSI, you add a Bollinger, RSI, MACD. With ours, you can literally break out any of the data.

31:36 So you can change the periods, the amount of times it repeats over these periods, whatever you want, and you can customize any data piece, which is really, I think, one of the most unique things about it: everything is completely customized. So that’s why everyone who’s using it has the opportunity to generate alpha versus some competitors, everyone’s doing the same strategy. Eventually you have diminishing alpha. Okay. Powerful.

32:02 Brian Rose: You keep talking about no-code. The future is no-code. It’s something you guys repeat over and over again. Why is that something you’re so obsessed with?

32:11 Drew Katz: It’s favorite.

32:12 Most people that claim to be no-code are not no-code. Their version of no-code is like C++ with a fancy wrapper. If you’ve ever seen a Urus, it’s like an Audi with a wrapper. It’s the same thing. Ours is truly no-code.

32:27 Like, I’m talking, my grandma lives in a nursing home and was able to make a strategy. I put it up on her TV and everything. I’m talking like it’s not, I mean, can you click this and say, drag over an indicator, you drop it? Can you connect a dot here? I would assume anyone who can set up a trading account, you know, with any broker, exchange, excuse me, is able to build it.

32:49 I mean, everyone knows who’s able to have an account, what makes you want to buy Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana, and what makes you want to sell it? It’s not hard, especially with the amazing alternative data.

33:00 Brian Rose: Did your grandma actually do it?

33:02 Drew Katz: She actually did it.

33:03 Brian Rose: Do you want any footage of this?

33:05 This is amazing.

33:06 Drew Katz: I have not footage of that. I have better footage. I have footage of her. She’s an old New Yorker.

33:13 I have footage of her leaving her nursing home room, and they’re saying she needs to use her cane, and she’s walking through the nursing home hall with her cane up in the air, using it to like, I don’t know, show that she has it, like, not actually using it. I’m like, you’re 98 or 97. I’m like, “I thought she was going through, celebrating her returns.” Maybe she was celebrating her returns. But it really is that easy.

33:38 She built one on her TV, and if she can do it, I really think anyone can.

33:44 Brian Rose: Dude, we’re creating amazing media here. I can see the titles of these clips. I traded my car for Solana. My grandma made money on MonoQuant.

33:54 It’s like we’re stacking them up here.

33:56 Drew Katz: So it’s really that simple. She’s a New Yorker.

33:58 Brian Rose: Yeah, I love it, man. I love it.

34:00 Talk to me about, we’ve seen some acquisitions out there, and it sounds like a lot of exchanges and other bigger players are starting to realize they need something like MonoQuant. I guess I’m really talking about Kraken acquiring NinjaTrader, and it seems like there’s a lot of people waking up to the fact that they need something like what you offer.

34:22 Drew Katz: Well, if you remember, most people in this audience may not remember, but I know you do. You remember back in, what, 20 years ago, New York Stock Exchange, what was it?

34:33 NASDAQ led it. There was Inet and Narco, were acquired, the electronic trading. One was like 1.8 billion, and then four months later the next, New York Stock Exchange had acquired for just like 3-something billion. I mean, it just shows that you have to stay up with the Joneses. So once NinjaTrader was acquired by Kraken and everybody was like, oh, wow, this is actually an amazing idea, like we’ve been telling you this, and now everybody wants to have a conversation, and is really understanding the value of no-code trading, because you have to trade, you have to automate to keep up, and being able to be a developer and then actually understand trading, and have a data scientist, and then the ability to plug in the APIs to automate to the exchanges, and then plug in data sources, and all these different things.

35:24 You can be the best in the world. You’re still going to take years to do this. And you can’t just plug into certain places. Some of them, you need contracts and entities and a lot of permissions. It’s not so easy.

35:35 With us, as long as you have an account with any of the reasonable major exchanges, it’s just an API. It’s as easy as it can be. We just cut out all of that work. You don’t have to be an expert anymore. I mean, I myself went from five, six strategy changes, not strategies, strategy changes in a week, to when we got the system no-code, to about 2,000 strategies in a week.

36:02 Brian Rose: Explain that. You just started playing with things?

36:05 Drew Katz: Well, to make a change prior, I had to tell my CTO, and he had to convey it to the other developers, and then each person had to do something, because not a change isn’t necessarily one line of code. Like my simple idea, you know, for, like, maybe a flash crash idea, is not one line of code. It could be 2,000 lines of code.

36:25 Who knows, right? But if it’s a node, it could be literally, you know, drag a candle over, excuse me, a node over, and say, if this drops in this much time, buy. And then you could drag another node over, be like, if this drops in this much, sorry, and it’s not drops. If this has maybe five red candles, sell. Like, that can be an entire strategy that takes five minutes to build.

36:49 Anything that you can visually see, you can quantify, which is my favorite part about it. That’s the artistry of this algorithm. I think that’s why I’d argue you get better results than most other systems or doing it yourself, unless you’re really, really good.

37:03 Brian Rose: So by being able to make so many different changes in a week, you were able to just play with things and to iterate and to start just building much better models.

37:12 Drew Katz: Yeah, you basically make a strategy, you back test it, back test it.

37:16 You can run as many as you want. I run tons of different models. Tweak it. Oh, this model’s garbage. Goodbye.

37:22 This model has potential. Let me tweak this. Run the next one. Run the next one. Let me try these 10 different like, you know, for momentum-based strategies.

37:30 What is there? RSI, Bollinger, MACD do effectively the same thing but slightly different. Which one’s going to complement your strategy the most, and then you finally found one? You dial it, and then you paper trade it. I think back testing and paper trading might be undervalued in this industry or any industry, but for me, I’d much rather be safe and test it.

37:50 And then once you’re very happy with it, it’s all the same engine, then you can deploy it live. And I think that’s another issue that’s unressed is not everyone has the same engine for back test, paper trade, and live. We do. So your results are going to be effectively the same exact thing across the board.

38:07 Brian Rose: This is a perfect time.

38:08 Can you explain to the layman those three concepts? Back testing, paper trading, and then live. What does that mean? If you had, I would say explain it to your grandma, but she sounds pretty smart. So, if you had explained it to my grandma, how would you explain that?

38:20 Drew Katz: Back testing is just basically off of historical data. What this model would have done back on these dates that you set, so you have to set certain dates. It could be from a year ago, two years ago, the prior month, you name it. Paper trading, I don’t. You come up with a new trading model where you’re like, “Okay, I want to put this this, this factor in there.

38:41 Let me see how it would have done from 20 in, in the calendar year 2024.” And you run that and it comes back and says, “All right, you would have been up 600%.” Okay, that’s a good piece of information. Then that’s really helpful. That means you know, okay, it would have done really well last year.

38:57 Brian Rose: That’s huge. Then you paper trade it, which means you do what?

39:00 Drew Katz: You take that same model. So yeah, if it would have done good, you know, especially if it does good in the bear market, it’s, you know, it’s a good model. And then paper trading is just a term for live trading with simulation.

39:13 So it’s basically live trading actually happening when it’s happening in the market. It’s just fake money. You’re not risking your own money. So you want to set it to, like, you know, a $10,000 account to simulate what you would do. I would highly recommend paper trading before deploying live.

39:29 Brian Rose: Right. Right. Although, how many people don’t do that? I don’t think many do that. But They back test it.

39:34 They say, “Let’s go.” They put the money on, and then they realize, “Uh oh, maybe this didn’t do.”

39:39 Drew Katz: Historical is good, but you know what you could have with historical? This could be the issue, is what you have, overfitting, cuz you already know what’s going to happen before it happens. So you’re just tweaking for what you already know is going to happen, versus real trading is kind of predicting what’s going to happen before it happens.

39:56 And that’s why I would certainly run it on paper trade for x amount of time.

40:15 Brian Rose: For how much time would you gotcha. All right. So, a week goes by. You put some fake amount of capital, and they literally has to try to execute, you know, with the volume constraints and all these things that might happen on exchanges.

41:15 And after a week you see how it did as a trading model, and you want to see that it has similar results to your back testing.

41:23 Drew Katz: Yeah, it should have similar or, um, you know, better results, but you know, live, uh, paper trading is the best you can do, um, until you’re truly in the trenches, like live simulation, like you know, anything else. There’s nothing closer to the real thing than that, than the real thing, and then you go live. I, you know, some people, if you’re really confident you have a great strategy, you go live with your full book.

41:48 If not, you know, do a percentage of it, and then you know, see how it goes. We have, uh, you have a kill switch if you decide I don’t like, maybe I made too much, maybe I lost it, um, you can kill it off, um, on your own. We will have a mobile app soon enough. Uh, we have it internally, but we’re not ready to release it yet. Um, it works great.

42:11 Brian Rose: Really?

42:11 Drew Katz: Yeah.

42:12 Brian Rose: Why would you kill it if you made too much?

42:15 Drew Katz: Um, scary. I don’t know.

42:16 You know, I’ve learned the hard way that sometimes, and I mean, I’ll say my favorite quote. Bulls, what? Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs go to slaughter.

42:26 If you make a certain amount, you may want to turn off your model and let it breathe. You know, it may, the market may revert. You may not be so lucky. You never know. Yeah.

42:35 Brian Rose: Sometimes it’s good to just, like, be happy making. Some of the returns you can make in crypto are wild. You would be happy. What are some of the wild returns in crypto?

42:45 Drew Katz: Oh boy.

42:45 Um, I started off what in 2016 when I was at Harvard. I, I, I turned a few thousand into a good few million in the first couple of months. Months. Oh yeah. Those days are long gone.

42:57 Brian Rose: Why are they gone?

42:58 Drew Katz: Because there’s less opportunity and there’s less people in there, aring the differences. You’re not going to see a coin go from like one penny to 50, 60 cents in a matter of days for no reason. And as the market matures, yes, you won’t have the fun crazy returns, but I think it’s safer. You know, every time there’s some crap that happens, you have some person or the market, excuse me, is like, we’re going to expect this and this and this from a new project to succeed.

43:24 And I think even, you know, same thing with VCs, like that ideation stuff, we don’t necessarily believe in that anymore. I want to see a new project. I want to see a minimum of an MVP. If not, I want to see the tech working. You know, we’re not going to release our coin until our tech is, you know, has well, our tech works already, but, you know, until we have X billions in volume, we want everything to be, you know, working perfectly and all of our users and token holders to be getting, uh, what’s, I don’t, dividends.

43:58 Um, basically, I don’t know, staking, staking in crypto, but effectively dividends for holding the, uh, coin.

44:04 Brian Rose: Okay. All right. Right. And I want to get to the coin and how some of that revenue is transferred to the token holders.

44:10 You’ve been doing this since 16. That’s the other thing is really different about you. I mean, you’ve been running models and you did it with your own money for a long period of time. Um, can you talk about that journey and why you decided to then do this?

44:25 Drew Katz: I mean, I was just had a lot of success with trading and I was realizing that it was virtually impossible to do it unless you’re stuck at your computer.

44:34 So, I was trying to figure out a way to automate it. Um, a normal execution model works fine in traditional markets, but this, the market here would crash, like the back end of an exchange could literally crash, and then that would click off my execution, and I would just be, you know, out of luck, because, you know, I didn’t know how to handle that. So, I had to partner with my CTO, Dylan, who’s just an absolute genius. I don’t know how he’s so smart. Um, and he was able to automate that but also handle for when the exchange turns offline, and then you know, automate the reporting and the analytics, and everything is done in real time.

45:12 So, you know, all the Greeks, all the ratios, all done in real time. You don’t need a NAV system anymore. Um, you could literally print out your own tear sheet, or you know, in more layman’s terms, a summary sheet of your performance. We’ve even have visualization data. So you don’t have to look at, I remember you.

45:29 Yeah, you probably remember this back in the day. We look at a trade log, and then we’d be like, lining up on a chart, be like, it’s about here. No, you look at our thing, millisecond accurate. You’re seeing where you’re buying, selling, scaling in, scaling out. It’s as easy as it can be.

45:43 Like, so you don’t necessarily have to know what Sharpe ratio is. I mean, of course, if you do, it’s probably better. But if you can, like, look at that chart, you can kind of see how it was too fast. I was too slow. It, it, I don’t think it can get easier than that.

45:56 Brian Rose: Wow. Okay. So, you built this, describes your own itch. Basically.

46:00 Drew Katz: Oh, yeah.

46:00 Brian Rose: Okay. Now, so many people who built these proprietary models, you never hear about them because they don’t want to tell anybody, cuz they’re busy making all this money behind the scenes. What made you want to offer this out to the world and build MonoQuant?

46:14 Drew Katz: Um, it was, I was originally that guy. I was thinking we were going to be like, rent.

46:19 Um, you know, we’re making good returns. We were making good returns, and I was happy with that. But uh March of 2024, I was on the phone with some OG Binance guys. Um, Jin Chow, he’s like their strategy officer back in the day. Brilliant guy.

46:36 And you know, we was telling him about it, and he just wasn’t overtly impressed with the returns, even though they were so good. He was like, “Why is this not a public tool?” And I was like, “I don’t know.” Oh, he’s like, I think the conversation went about Dalio versus Bloomberg. I was like, uh, I understand.

46:54 So, we decided from then to make it a public tool. I think 2 days later I hopped on a plane to Dubai, went to Token2049, and since then it’s just been, you know, making it a business, making sure the UX/UI is pretty, making sure we’re partnered with every major exchange, off of, across every major region, whether it’s Asia, Europe, um, even the United States. We have some really cool stuff coming out of there, where we, one of the main people. Um, so you can automate your trades with just a simple plugin.

47:27 Brian Rose: You’ve been doing this for just over a year. That’s crazy.

47:31 Drew Katz: We’ve been busy.

47:32 Brian Rose: Um, you mentioned the US. I mean, obviously regulation has completely done a 180 in the last 6 months since the new administration.

47:40 Um, is that an area you’re focusing on? Does it feel much more comfortable doing business there going forward, or did that never really stop you from doing what you were doing?

47:52 Drew Katz: Our focus has been global the whole time. We kind of had back burner the United States with the prior administration for yeah, um, and then as we got a new administration who’s, you know, pro-innovation, pro-crypto, we got very excited. Um, it’s very noticeable that the country, United States, is accepting it, and if you look at every major bank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Croup, they’re all making very public statements.

48:20 And by the time it’s public, it’s old news for them. They’re internally having some trade stuff going on. I can’t say more than that, but you know, it’s very exciting times. And the US-based exchanges are making some phenomenal strides. Um, I’d say Kraken is very impressive.

48:38 And, you know, if you’re a US citizen, you don’t necessarily have to worry about VPNs and offshore. you know, you can be there, use Kraken, and do a lot of really impressive stuff. And I think a lot of capital gains for crypto just being straight removed, depending on what state you live in. So, it could be a true digital gold rush, suit. Right?

49:02 Brian Rose: There’s rumors that certain states, like Florida, might ban capital gains on crypto, which would completely change the game, wouldn’t it?

49:10 Drew Katz: Oh my gosh. Yeah, if you could imagine if you automate a trading system, and maybe it’s in and out of the market, which is technically short-term capital gains, but it’s safer, and you just play with the volatility in and out. You’re not being too greedy. You know, you could have a printing press, and it’s not being taxed, and then you can just, you know, take out a portion, and, you know, enjoy a nice car with a horse on it, or get the beach house, whatever.

49:37 Brian Rose: Um, I, I’m sure a lot of people are thinking, okay, how can I play with this? How can I try this out? Is it in beta right now? Can the average person jump on there? What are you rolling out over the next 6 to 12 months for people when it comes to MonoQuant?

49:51 Drew Katz: Oh, we have a lot of stuff. Um, beta is out right now, open beta. Um, you can find the link in our Twitter. It should be on our Instagram as well. We’re not big on Instagram, but Twitter, definitely, you’ll find it.

50:03 Um, we’re, uh, very easy to set up. Um, you just, yeah, use it, set it up, and then live should be ready in the coming weeks. So as long as you have an account at one of the major exchanges, what I call best practice for, um, layments, that basically means like they’re doing everything the right way. You don’t have to worry about something sketchy happening, your money disappearing, none of that. They’ll be around in 5 to 10 years.

50:30 Those are the exchanges we work with.

50:32 Brian Rose: Okay, gotcha. So you handle all the execution. I come, I build my model, I stick some capital somewhere, and then you guys execute.

50:39 Drew Katz: You just have your capital at whatever exchange you like.

50:42 We have a DeFi stuff rolling out too. You know, you keep that with a wallet. Um, and yeah, basically we execute, you build your strategy, and you know, you just let it go, and eventually, soon, within the next 12 months, we’ll absolutely have our mobile app out. So, while you can build a strategy on there, and you saw, I think you saw Dylan might have done it in front of you in about 30 seconds.

51:03 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s incredible.

51:04 He’s crazy. I wouldn’t do that. Also, I don’t have a phone as big as his.

51:08 Drew Katz: But, um, I use it for monitoring. You can straight up just like you would any other trading system, like thinkorswim if it’s a little more old school, but still solid platform.

51:17 You can log in, keep an eye on it, see how you’re doing, see all your beautiful metrics. And again, you’ll be able to share your summary sheet or tear sheet. Let’s say you want to WhatsApp, Telegram, email your friend. It’ll just be like a beautiful little PDF. The same one that if you were in proper finance 20 years ago, you’d spend six days straight making it in Excel, and it looked like crap.

51:42 But, you know, all of it just automated real time. There’s no analytics to do. You’re not trying to calculate a Sortino anymore. None of that. Wow.

51:51 Brian Rose: Wow. Okay. And, um, talk to me about the token. Are you going to issue a token? What’s, how, how does that token make MonoQuant better?

51:59 Did you think about not issuing the token? Tell me about this.

52:02 Drew Katz: People have tried to get us to do tokens for years, and my main thing, Dylan’s main thing was, the token without utility is useless. We don’t want to make money off a useless token. We don’t want to cheapen the brand.

52:14 Our token is like basically, um, going to be coming out after we’re doing a certain amount of billions in volume, just because we want to be offering staking for, or dividends, depending on the words you use, for our token holders um, right out of the gate. Um, and effectively it’s like a stablecoin in essence for the system. So you want to trade cross-asset class. You don’t have to trade and have, you know, an Ethereum or a Solana or a Bitcoin to trade cross-asset.

52:46 As long as you have your monk token, you can go through it, and eventually you’ll be able to do that to go cross-asset, like let’s just say from Bitcoin to Apple stock, Bitcoin to Tesla, you name it. You’ll be able to do that soon enough, too.

53:02 Brian Rose: Okay. And then you’ll pay dividends from some of your profits into the tokens.

53:07 Drew Katz: Yeah.

53:07 A very, very, very generous percentage of the profits go straight into a pool that is, you know, given as dividends or staking, again, whatever your term is, to the holders, and you know, based on how many tokens you have, based on is how much you get, and I believe that you’re going to get paid out in stablecoin, so you’re holding our token but you get your rewards in stablecoin, like a proper stablecoin. Okay. Not our coin interest. So, it’s, it’s a very good system, but it’s not meant like a regular token.

53:44 Brian Rose: It’s a true utility. That’s refreshing, because I think everybody’s getting sick and tired of people using tokens just to raise capital on a bunch of hype that’s not there. And you guys already have a model that makes money on the back end. And so, why go down that? Like you said, why cheapen the brand?

54:00 Why not just have it as something that’s actually incredible that delivers? Wow. Like you said, pays in stablecoins. It’s like, what a great concept, right?

54:08 Drew Katz: Yeah.

54:08 We want.

54:09 Brian Rose: It’s a confident move, isn’t it?

54:11 Drew Katz: We want our holders to be happy with it. And we don’t need the coin to raise money. We don’t need the coin to run the business.

54:20 The coin enhances the business, and that’s why we’re able to pay out, you know, for the holders, but we’re waiting for a very good amount of traction and things going before we, you know, go down that rabbit hole, because again, it’s, it’s not necessary. Yeah. And we don’t want to be one of those companies that just issues a token for the sake of issuing a token.

54:39 Brian Rose: You know, it’s, it’s wild, Drew. I’ve had a bunch of companies pitch us in the last couple weeks for London Real Ventures, and some have said, “We’re not issuing a token, because we think we’ll be acquired by a Web 2 company, and we don’t need this mess that they have to deal with, because if Google’s going to buy us or Amazon’s going to buy us and incorporate the services, we’re going to keep it strict equity, because we’re going to build a business that actually makes money.”

55:04 And they’re actually going to stay away from it. And I thought that was interesting.

55:09 Drew Katz: Um, you know, I guess it really depends on the business model. If the token’s not actually doing something useful, there’s no purpose for it. I mean, you know, it’s the same reason on so many different platforms where, you know, you have one thing to go across the board.

55:26 You know, I’m sure PayPal is something internally so you can, you know, go through things, or if you ever go to, you know, a theme park, or if you used to go to an arcade, get, could they take quarters? Of course. But for some reason, not for some reason, for use of an efficiency, you always got their little token, you know? You swap it out in the front. This is old school.

55:44 You swap it out in the front, you get their gold coin, and, you know, ski ball and you’re trying to win, or the shooting game. I don’t know.

55:54 Brian Rose: Yeah, I remember all that. Drew, what would you say is your single biggest challenge in the next 12 months?

56:02 Drew Katz: User adoption.

56:03 I just want people to understand more about what it is and how easy it is to use and just start, you know, using the system. I think people will love it once they get a handle on it. It’s free to use unlike most competitors. So, there’s definitely nothing to lose to make a few backtests, and if you have good results, make a paper trade. If that works well, maybe you make a live account, and then you actually need to plug in your APIs to your exchange, because, you know, live needs money.

56:33 But I really think that’s the goal. So, you know, we’re going to have to do a lot of education, tutorials, going around, making sure people know about the system and how easy it is.

56:43 Brian Rose: What is the exit scenario for this? Is this something you see being acquired by an exchange in the future or by something else? Is this something you want to write out for 10 years?

56:53 What do you think happens next in a year of acquisitions? I mean, Jesus, every other month there’s an acquisition. Darabit was bought for 3.6 billion. Um, Oly’s, uh, Wonderfy was bought when I was out of consensus. Now, there’s rumors that Circle is going to be bought, and now it looks like BlackRock’s buying 10% and they’re gonna IPO.

57:13 Drew Katz: I mean, this is the year, and maybe next year. I’m very excited about that. Um, we’ve already had a few acquisition offers. We’re definitely not quite ready for acquisition yet. Um, but if, you know, we go the route of an acquisition, it’s going to be, have to be a really big partner who adds value to what we’re doing.

57:35 And I think the CTO and me, Dylan, my co-founder, are going to be pretty adamant on staying around with the company for at least a certain amount of time to make sure the vision gets through. We want to make sure that we become the company that you can trade any asset class with any data point, you know, no problem. Every data is actionable. We want to achieve that goal before we step away. Even if there is an acquisition in process, you know, maybe be the next Bloomberg of the future, where you can build your own strategies as well.

58:08 Brian Rose: It’s exciting. How are you enjoying this new part of your life, where you’re building a business and looking for customers, whereas the previous years were making a lot of money on your models?

58:19 Drew Katz: It’s more fulfilling 100%.

58:21 Brian Rose: How so?

58:22 Drew Katz: Um, making money is cool.

58:23 I love it. Everyone likes making money, but you know, you’re only fulfilled in that when you’re making money, and then that you become numb to, and you’re just like, “Oh, I made money. I’m not even looking.” Like, I, I don’t look at my trade accounts very often, in short of performance numbers. I don’t look at how much they’re going up.

58:42 I don’t care if I have enough money to live my life, travel where I need to, have a nice house, have a nice car, get my girl the purses she always needs.

58:52 Brian Rose: Funny how that works.

58:54 Drew Katz: Oh yeah, I have to come back with a nice gift after every nice conference if I’m gone too long. But you know, that’s the beauty of it. I forgot what the question was.

59:05 Brian Rose: No, you like engaging with, I guess, the…

59:08 Drew Katz: Oh, the most fulfilling part is I like building something that people are using. I like something tangible. I like what people are able to use.

59:16 Brian Rose: You’re not just creating wealth.

59:18 You’re creating something that’s, it’s so cool, man. It’s like you’re creating something that’s changing the world. So, on the one hand, you’re beating out all the competition to be the next trading platform, possibly the next Bloomberg, and then also, knocking out NinjaTrader hopefully and all those other no-code platforms that are not no-code. But at the same time, and this is, you know, if you have any remote bit of altruism, you’re democratizing finance.

59:46 Drew Katz: So there’s so many people that are literally 10 times smarter than anyone I’ve ever worked with, you know, at the funds and as smart as anyone I was ever at school with. Um, but didn’t come from the right family or from the right country. Those guys can get on the platform, you know, you know, and you’re from Philippines, you’re from India, from some country in Indonesia, wherever, where they’re freaking geniuses and they didn’t have the right opportunities.

1:01:07 They get on the platform, they build the right model, and all of a sudden this guy from another country who has a lot of money but isn’t a good trader can copy trade this gentleman, and then the guy who built the strategy is making money because he’s getting paid on volume and return, and all that, and the gentleman who copy trades him is making money, and all of a sudden this guy from whatever country who had no money now has a few thousand dollars to his name. So copy trading, and then he can have his own account compound that, and now this guy maybe he gets a house, and he does all these things. He, like, that’s cool stuff for us.

1:01:40 So it’s kind of like a win-win. Like, we can make money but also, like, really help people who don’t have the opportunities a lot of us have had.

1:01:48 Brian Rose: What do you say to people that say, “Drew, it’s too late. BlackRock’s in now, and all the big players, and there’s not the opportunities that were back when you were making money a few years ago.” What do you say to that?

1:01:59 Drew Katz: I love BlackRock being in. I like Blackstone being in. I like all the banks being in, because that means that it’s here to stay. I think we’ve now proven between the White House and all the other governments around the entire world accepting crypto, and now the biggest financial institutions that literally own like everything. I mean, BlackRock owns the Panama Canal more or less.

1:02:23 Um, them getting in, their stamp of approval is a huge thing. And you know, from what our conversations are with these actual institutions are, they’re not looking to compete with us. They’re looking to work with us, utilize us, buy stakes in us. Um, because a lot of the stuff that we did, you can’t do. And if you had the partnerships we did, we would know about it, because there’s, there’s either just us in some instances or like less than five in the world with some of these other people.

1:02:52 So very, you know, very well who is, you know, competing in that regard.

1:02:56 Brian Rose: You’re bringing something really unique to the table, and you know that, and people are recognizing that as well.

1:03:03 Drew Katz: It ended up turning out like that. We, and it first started out building like an investment tool for our own needs, to make sure that we can trade our own thing. And I was like, I want this, I want that.

1:03:14 I like, you know, this from TradeStation, this from thinkorswim, this from Barra, this from Aladdin, this from Bloomberg, and we were cherry-picking all the ideas we loved, and over the years just adding to it, and now it became a business, and I think that’s why I have so much fun with these, because this is what I was doing in my, like, this is pro, really dorky, but in my free time I was building a trading system with the guys, you know. I’d have, like, oh, I have time off, I’m going to go over to England and, uh, meet with the guys, and we’re going to blueprint this out. This is my free time, and it ended up, you know, growing into a business, which is, I think, part of why the team is doing so well with it, because I’d argue that nobody in there is there to make money.

1:03:54 Um, they are there to be builders. I mean, funny enough, um, our lead quant, and I’m not exaggerating, this is his cat, is the most famous cat in the United Kingdom on YouTube. I’m not kidding. He does obstacle courses and everything. So, he’s already got it made.

1:04:14 I think he makes enough money off his kitty to substantiate his life. Well, so just, you know, working with us, he’s working with us because he’s a builder and he’s driven to make something special, and that’s what everyone in the company is like. So I think that’s also what makes it more fun.

1:04:29 Brian Rose: That’s always how the best products are made, always. What do you think of the state of the crypto markets?

1:04:34 What do you think’s happening in the next couple years? Do you think that four-year cycle is happening? Are we in a super cycle because there’s so many new players and new variables, or do you not think about it because your job is just to build models, and all you care about is volatility?

1:04:50 Drew Katz: Super. I mean, cycles are cool.

1:04:52 I think when people are talking about they’re talking about a lot of this, for, like, meme coins making weird rallies, and they’re on the backs of, like, other main coins driving them. So, like, meme coins are great. I guess if you want to go, you know, it’s like, you know, online Vegas. So you can make a lot of money, you can lose it all, play at your own risk. Um, I, like, I think the market is in a bull market.

1:05:17 I think we’ve had our Pets.com moment. Um, and I, I would argue that a lot of liquidity is freed up from these goofy projects that had no tech or anything, and people are now investing and looking to get behind real projects, cuz there’s a lot of amazing solutions that are coming from AI, from infrastructure, from crypto, blockchain, what have you. And this is where I’d be investing, is like something that’s, like, going to change the world. Like, do you need crypto to make this project to work?

1:05:50 No. But with crypto, it’s an enhancement. You know, same thing that Google did. Same, you know, Google literally just made a better version of what the Yellow Pages. I mean, obviously they’ve done a million things since then, but that’s all they originally were doing.

1:06:03 Yeah. We’re just trying to make a better version.

1:06:06 Brian Rose: What do you think? How high does this bull market go? Do you have ideas in your mind on Bitcoin highs on this cycle or in the next couple years?

1:06:15 Drew Katz: I mean, I really think Bitcoin has room to go, to grow, and I think it’s definitely going to be bullish for a while. Um, I think people might be disappointed in the rate that it grows, because I think as it, you know, gets into these higher numbers, you know, it’s going to slow down growth. Is it going to keep going up? Yes, I think so. But I think, you know, it’s not going to be growing at like 20, 30% like some of the other newer coins are.

1:06:42 But at the same time, some of the newer coins are a lot more risky. So, you know, it’s playing the game. What I do like is that the market’s maturing. It’s adulting. So, you know, technical patterns are actually more respected.

1:06:54 You can use this stuff to trade. Um, there’s no more. There’s less and less of these stupid scams and schemes. You know, things are being able to get, you’re able to get banking. You’re able to get insured.

1:07:05 A lot of these, um, barriers for the crypto market that made it so much harder for a crypto company to succeed are, you know, diminishing. I mean, there’s even solutions for treasury management right now. I mean, with everything else that crypto companies face, for them to convert from their coin to a stablecoin to fiat, they’d be paying 3 to 5 plus percent. No, more than three. Five plus percent, which is a lot, a lot of money.

1:07:31 Brian Rose: Yeah, very much so. Some people say that Bitcoin has been outperforming everything, and Bitcoin has been dominating. You can see Bitcoin dominance, you know, is still quite high, and it’s made this altcoin season, it’s made people question whether it’s even going to come. Do you have thoughts on that? Because you mentioned you trade, say, the top 100 cryptos, and there’s quite a few.

1:07:52 Drew Katz: Oh, I trade the top five.

1:07:54 Brian Rose: Five. Okay.

1:07:54 Drew Katz: Five for liquid. All right.

1:07:56 Okay. All right. I, I, I, Bitcoin, Solana, Ethereum, XRP. No, I don’t trust, uh, I, I have an actual uh financial perspective on XRP. I also know people that work there.

1:08:11 Um, XRP and Ripple are not the same thing. Ripple technology is working more efficiently. Will XRP go up? It’s very possible. But for, for, because there’s so many coins issued for XRP to go up, they would have to have a market cap that would be bigger than Apple.

1:08:32 That’s possible. I wouldn’t bet on that personally. I mean, I might be wrong, but that’s a, that’s a big feat. I mean, Apple’s Apple. Yeah.

1:08:43 Brian Rose: All right. So, you stay away from trading XRP.

1:08:45 Drew Katz: I, like, I mean, personally, I, I like trading Bitcoin and Solana. Those, those are, I know those are going to go up if there’s a weird flash crash. There’s plenty of price action.

1:08:54 My more aggressive models could be, you know, either one of those. I’m not going to have liquidity issues, because, you know, I’m trading a reasonable number. And, you know, but I would say for trading algorithms, you definitely want to have a pair with liquidity. Yeah. Because you don’t want to be stuck.

1:09:10 Brian Rose: Okay. So, those are the two you favor. Do you play with Ethereum or anything else?

1:09:15 Drew Katz: Ethereum is great. Um, you know, it works.

1:09:18 Um, I’d say Ethereum is more of a buy-and-hold strategy. Um, because it does not move as fast, and it’s weird, kind of a coin. It can go up 20% in a day with little notice. You know, you have 50 different announcements that this person, this person, this person’s bought Ethereum. It should go up.

1:09:35 It doesn’t move.

1:09:36 Brian Rose: Yeah. Then randomly it goes up 20%. Was it last week or the week before?

1:09:41 Drew Katz: 50% in 7 days.

1:09:42 Yeah. So, so I, h, I am fully supportive of it. I held it. Um I just, I wouldn’t trade it like Bitcoin and Solana. Right?

1:09:52 Harder to trade. It’s a harder trade. Okay. And you’ve learned that over the years. I’ve learned that over the years.

1:09:56 I think that’s one of the things with MonoQuant, the benefit of it versus like trying to trade it yourself. Um, because, you know, you’re either building an algorithm and you’re going to lose some in, you know, some of the translation, or you’re sitting at a desk. Um, but all those little things that people have learned over the years. I don’t think any of us are brand new to crypto anymore. Um, it’s like, what do I see in a chart?

1:10:18 What do I see in the news that makes me want to buy? You can make that an algorithm.

1:10:22 Brian Rose: Okay. How do you feel about those other coins as we go down to say the 50 top market caps in CoinMarketCap? Do you think they’re going to have their day?

1:10:30 There’s a lot of great utility projects in there. Do you think potentially those are worth trading on, ALOS is smaller size? What are your thoughts?

1:10:38 Drew Katz: Absolutely. Top 100 coins, as long as they have the right volume and market cap, they’re worth trading.

1:10:43 In terms of long-term holding, I would look at these coins like I would look at a VC investment. Is this coin going to be here in 5 years? Does their tech exist? Is that a real business model? Um, if yes, yeah, you can hold it.

1:11:00 But, you know, for me, outside of major coins that I know are going to be here in 20 years, I’m I’m in and out, and I like to play with the majors, but I’m also not looking for some of the returns some of the other people are looking at with some of the smaller coins. I, I’ve, I’ve been around long enough. I’m happy with, you know, singles, doubles, triples. Just getting on base consistently is to me better, is more rewarding than looking for home runs. I’m not trying to be Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa.

1:11:29 Brian Rose: Spoken like a true trader. I love it. I love it. Drew, 5 years from now, if I just checked out and came back in and took a look, what does MonoQuant look like if everything goes according to plan?

1:11:41 Drew Katz: We are the go-to financial system.

1:11:43 We are soup to nuts. What you use for trading. Um, you know, short of being a quant, quant fund yourself, you can gain value in this, whether you’re a retail trader, a family office, a proumer, hedge funds, depending on, you know, you know who you have there. But you know, you can go cross-asset class soon enough. You can build an algorithm for anything, treasury management, you know, portfolio rebalancing.

1:12:09 If you want to have alpha generation, you can build several models within one strategy. You know, this part’s for flash crashes. This is for trending, and this is for that random times when it starts to go up, like, you know, Ethereum jumped 50% in a week. I have a strategy that would have been in that and would not have exited until it had a certain amount of indications turning it out. We don’t have exit.

1:12:33 You don’t have to have a take profit or an exit, um, anymore. You can just have exit logic. So, until the market turns down, you could ride a 50-60% trade, which as you’ve seen with Ethereum, crazy but true. Yeah, it is crazy. And you can only do that with these really specialized models, and the days of a stop-loss order hopefully are behind us, because it’s just such a caveman approach to trading.

1:13:00 I mean, how can you have a stop-loss with a market that, like, you know, in the traditional markets, we used to know that, like, the range is 20 handles. You have to factor a stop-loss for five, six handles. Um, a handle is one point for non-traders. It’s, like, a percentage a lot of times. Yeah.

1:13:17 So, you knew, but you knew this was your range, and you knew this. It never left this range but like one or two days a year, and you are usually okay. Um, with crypto the range you don’t really know, and the range can change by the day. So, yes, you can have stop losses, but being able to define exit logic the way you define entry logic gives you a big, um, opportunity to really, like, you can truly define it, if you want to have a certain amount of candles.

1:13:46 Like, I have strategies myself where it’s like five green candles is, is a, is an exit. And people be like, “Why would you sell it? There’s five green candles.” I was like, “Cuz the market’s overbought.” You know this.

1:13:58 Um, and I can have, you know, don’t sell without a MACD turning down. Well, again, that’s an obvious one. And if you’re ever looking at a chart, the MACD tends to turn down before the price drops. So, usually you’re the first one out. Yes.

1:14:10 Can the market actually go up still once the MACD is turned down? Of course, but I don’t want to be that guy. I just want the meat and potatoes. Yeah. That’s another old school term.

1:14:18 Brian Rose: Yeah. Um, you, you texted me the other day, a couple months ago, and you were like, “Brian, this, it’s so obvious to me when I look at this market.” It’s almost like you’re Neo in The Matrix. Like, you can see it right in front of you. Just obvious things happening, where most people all they see is the matrix, because they don’t have all of these signals and details that you’ve picked out.

1:14:40 They just see the charts that are presented to them on the exchanges, and they see the indicators to get them to do this and that. But like with your models, you can see clear strategies to make money.

1:14:52 Drew Katz: Yeah. It’s like everything in life, everything’s bigger than that. Like, if you’re just like looking, you know, if you’re just looking at the charts on a, on a exchange, you’re a horse with blinders on.

1:15:03 You’re just seeing this. But like what you have to realize is besides the actual technical stuff, macros affect the entire trading capital markets, whatever, a lot more across the board as a matter of the asset class now, but crypto is, I’d argue, hyper-sensitive to, um, all sorts of news, and you know, all of this stuff is actionable. I mean, if you remember when Bybit had that wallet hack. Yeah. Okay.

1:15:30 That could have been a great buying opportunity. So that would have been an outflow from Bybit. Very obvious one. Hey, a good percentage of your book is outflowed. So, like, you could have that as your part of your flash crash, black swan event.

1:15:44 I mean, you know, or inflows with BlackRock. If BlackRock does, dt dot dot, inflows of Bitcoin, you buy, and you know what probably will rally the market. BlackRock’s pretty respectable, you know, old school. I don’t think too many people can argue they’re not pretty smart. Yeah.

1:16:00 Brian Rose: What amazing to have those indicators, because I remember that Bybit thing, and you could have been tracking that on chain. You could have tracked all this.

1:16:07 Drew Katz: Yeah, because I think it was even published with news before they said anything, cuz people saw that it happened to them before they even announced that it happened to them. This was known because all of these data providers we have, they’re some of the best in the world, and they track all of this stuff.

1:16:21 And if you’re watching their websites, right, or you have maybe their alerts set up, some of them offer alerts, you will see this, and it’s phenomenal. I’d argue some of the best data in the world. However, it’s not actionable. That’s the issue. So, by having it as a node on our platform, you know, rather than seeing this happen on the website, you know, that thing about having multiple screens, so you don’t have to be looking at the screen, see this happened here.

1:16:45 Kind of like the squawk box used to be. You’d see this news announcements across the screen like, oh, this happened here. Okay, let me react. It’s like by the time you’re seeing it here, that your system has reacted. Yeah.

1:16:57 I forget the insane timing. Dylan, if he was here, could give it to you, but basically in the time that you can blink your eye, faster than you can click a button, the system will have ingested all of that data, made a decision, executed the trade with the exchange, and given you back information that it’s been done. So you just can’t compete with that, because for us, we’d have to blink our eye, look, click. This is what we need.

1:17:27 Brian Rose: And again, I want to just maybe explain to people that never been in the trading business.

1:17:33 I mean, traditionally, the pit traders in Chicago, what they would do is they would sit in this big pit with 200 guys in there, and they would know, they would look up there where all the brokers were, and they would see the Goldman guys and the these guys and these guys, and they would watch, okay, who are the orders coming from? What are they doing? What are we hearing in the pits? What’s the buying? What’s the selling?

1:17:53 What’s the volume? And that was the way that they would try to get the edge. As a trader on Wall Street, right, you have the squawk boxes. So, the guys are shouting down what’s happening. You’re looking at the screen.

1:18:02 You hear the FX guys talking over here. You hear the blue guys. Then take another 10 years later, you got guys in the city with 12 screens because they’re trying to watch the news, trying to, these are all incredibly imperfect ways to try to trade the market. But back then, that’s maybe all that was available. Nowadays, you’re saying take all that information, which was probably one-tenth of 1%.

1:18:22 Drew Katz: Yeah, exactly. And it was slow through a human filter, and that’s assumes you’re not in the bathroom, you’re not at lunch, you’re not asleep. It’s the same thing. It’s like all of that information, but just like nowadays, there’s a lot more information available, all that information on steroids. So, you know, if you look at when we did used to listen to the outcry or the squawk box, right?

1:18:41 I knew who the best traders were. I knew who the big traders were. I knew who the good traders were, and they’d be like, “Oh, 50 cars, 100 cars, you know, those are, you know, we knew the traders were. We knew who to listen to.” It’s the same thing with, like, inflows or wallet action.

1:18:56 So, with depending on our data provider, you can track wallets, you can track inflows and outflows, and it’s the same thing. Everyone knows certain people are doing certain things, it’s most likely to have a bullish effect. Um, and certain people saying certain things is most likely to have a bearish effect. So, it’s very obvious. And then, yeah, that’s the most beautiful thing.

1:19:15 And like you said, bathroom, sleeping, lunch, dinner, whatever.

1:19:19 Brian Rose: Yeah. Or bad day or not paying attention or I didn’t sleep well or I had a fight with my girlfriend. All these things mess with your mentally. You can’t sit glued to a screen, and if you do, you will be having issues mentally.

1:19:33 Yeah. I remember, I, when I moved from Bankers Trust to the First National Bank of Chicago. So here I was in Chicago, and again, it was a little out of the loop of Manhattan, but we got, we were literally like two blocks away from the pits, and so sometimes after work you’d have drinks with them. Now they would get off at 3 and start drinking at 3:15. You know, this is the way they worked.

1:19:53 But I remember I knew some of the big local guys down there that had been doing it for 10, 20 years, with that made 10, 20, $30 million. And one of the guys said, he’s like, I only show up on the floor if I’m clear mentally. without question. If I’ve had a big argument with the misses the night before, or if I’m angry, or if I’m feeling sick or I haven’t slept, I literally won’t show up, because I know when I do, I lose money. It’s, and that just shows you how, how that, that human that human component is such a big factor, and why most people probably make terrible decisions.

1:21:13 Drew Katz: No, no, you’re 100% right. People, um, back in the day, when you were discretionary trading, you had rules like, if you lost this much, you would have to sit out for this. If you lost two days in a row, you’d have to sit out for this. If you won this much, you’d have to sit out for this. Interesting.

1:21:31 We had these rules. Why? Because everything was mental. Everything would screw you up. If you came into the office and you look like crap, because everyone knew that you got into an argument with your woman, your biological woman, then you would have an issue, cuz you’re not going to focus.

1:21:47 You’re thinking about all that crap. Maybe she’s blowing your phone up, whatever it is. You know, you have issues. So, this eliminates those issues, because I don’t care if you’re the best trader in the world, somebody’s always going to have bad days. And this algorithm eliminates that.

1:22:02 And for people who are maybe the best traders, okay, you can quantify your strategy. So, you know, even the best traders got to go to dinner, got to eat, got to sleep. They can quantify it very easily, and then they can probably be better traders because they’re trading more. Yeah.

1:22:17 Brian Rose: I want to close with something you said right in the beginning.

1:22:20 You said, “Look, people investing in crypto, they’re going to buy anyways.” So, you go on and you buy some Bitcoin. Maybe it’s the first time you buy 100 bucks of Bitcoin. Then you see some Solana. You buy some Solana, and then you start upping your portfolio, you’re going to make these decisions anyways.

1:22:35 So, why not have something behind it that’s going to tell you more about the right times to get in, the right times to get out. It’s like driving right now without Google Maps. It’s like you got to be crazy not to do something like that.

1:22:48 Drew Katz: Yeah. I mean, even if your, even if your goal is to be like a Michael Saylor strategy, and we have institutions wanting us to use us for these types of things, and you’re basically, your goal is to buy and hold more or less.

1:23:01 You can set up the same thing with treasury management. You can set up the system, and you could be buying the dips for Bitcoin and selling 20% after it’s run x amount, and then rebying that 20% when it dips, and then selling it when it pops. That same 20%, and then that will compound a lot if you’re doing it. And these can be models that you can make pretty quickly depending on your expertise, but you know, it’s not very hard to say if Bitcoin drops 5% in a day, buy it.

1:23:31 Usually, we all know that’s going to happen. And you know, Bitcoin drops, we also know that it’s going to probably recover. Um, you know, so long as you’re not being greedy, you won’t have these issues.

1:23:41 Brian Rose: Yeah. Greed is one of the biggest issues with trading.

1:23:44 It’s a killer, huh?

1:23:45 Drew Katz: Yeah. Just a killer.

1:23:47 Brian Rose: Fear and greed, right?

1:23:49 Drew Katz: Yeah.

1:23:49 But greed is worse than fear. I’d say greed’s for the worst.

1:23:52 Brian Rose: That’s wild. You know what I think I should do? I’m just throwing this out there as an idea.

1:23:57 I think I should set up an account with you and trade and start talking about it publicly, and maybe even posting my results and just showing people the method behind the madness, with the continual message that, okay, now you’re in crypto. Welcome to a whole new world where the old school trading won’t work, and just talk about what’s happening, and talk about the results, and talk about some of the things that happened in that trading account, and just show people that there could be a new way to do this. Yeah.

1:24:27 Drew Katz: I mean, I think I, and I think you’d be surprised how easy it is, like I mean, I have a trending model, which is a little bit more advanced. There’s like, you know, Hurst exponent and some other stuff in there. But for more interesting, not interesting, but more simplistic models, you could literally just have something that capturing with two nodes um uh capturing flash crashes. And then another one is basically the rever the inverse of that. Sorry.

1:24:55 Okay. Um which is basically, you know, the market just ran. Yeah. Why? There’s no technical pattern.

1:25:01 There’s no macro news. Yeah. Why? Probably because some random whale bought, dot dot dot dot, dun, the market’s going to jump 5, 10%, and then I don’t want to be buying after that. So just like you can capture flash crashes, you can have a model that’s just basically, like, when the market starts to go like that, if it’s like done in, you know, x amount of time, you buy it.

1:25:20 So, you know, and again, as long as you’re not looking if it’s going to rip 10%, if you’re looking to make 5% in that 10, meat and potatoes, you’ll be good. And those are those parts of the models took me 5 minutes to build, both.

1:25:32 Brian Rose: That’d be amazing. It’d be nice also to report back and say, “Okay, by the way, yesterday this happened, and the algorithm showed to do this and that, and that’s how we made the money, or this happened and we didn’t jump in on that because the algorithm knew not to do the stop.”

1:25:46 Drew Katz: I, it just makes it so much easier. I have basically an automated version of what I do discretionary. Um, it made about this, let’s just say it made 3x more in the last 45 days than it made in all the other months. And it made, like, face, whatever, I can be, can, uh, it made about 7,800% um from January 1st through mid-March-ish, which is when the rallies started. I think it was March-ish, and then March through, it was like mid-late March, whenever the rally started, and from then, the, um, the results have been like 5x.

1:26:33 Okay. Because, and then that’s, I think, how you define a good strategy. If you can make money, good money, in the bear market, you will make money in the bull market, you know. Um, and I think a lot of people can do this. I don’t think it’s necessarily that I’m the best trader per se.

1:26:47 I think it’s that this tool allows you to do things that are not necessarily available to anyone except for, like, top quant funds in the world. If they can build this, cuz they’re, you know, that expertise, that budget, sure. But for everyone else, I don’t think so.

1:27:01 Brian Rose: Is the high-speed trading component, or the fact that you’re getting little bits of information, is that something where you’re at a disadvantage to some of these bigger funds? Do they have quicker information than where I’ll get necessarily?

1:27:13 Drew Katz: No. Okay. I don’t think anyone on earth can compete with our latency. Um, the guys that do, does the infrastructure for these people, that’s who did our infrastructure. So, we have the fastest possible stuff in the world.

1:27:30 And in terms of data providers, if these funds are doing it, they are using some of the same data providers. So for data, we collect, we have all of our own data straight from the exchanges. We process, store, we do everything there. But for the alternative data, we have who I would argue some of the best in the world, like Arkham, you know, um, some very well-known people, uh, who’ve made some very big AI companies or some of their main investors. Um, and they’re just some of the best, uh, data in the world.

1:28:02 No one really has these partnerships with these guys. We do. I know this because I’m friends friendly with the the founders, the CEOs, and no one, no one’s thought to do this. No one’s thought to take the best data and make it actionable. And I think that’s one of the issues we’ve had for years is, you know, for the last couple of years, we’ve been a data-driven world.

1:28:20 Like, everyone’s like making data, collecting data, but like, I think a question that’s been probably on the minds for, well, probably 10 years now, is what do we do with this data?

1:28:30 Brian Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Now you have a solution. I think I think you peaked the interest of a lot of people here.

1:28:36 Um how can they start playing with MonoQuant website, Twitter? Or what’s the best way to jump in right now and and start building these models, copy trading, getting familiar and start testing this?

1:28:50 Drew Katz: If you immediately, if you go to monoquant.com or you go to our Twitter, um, you can see, um, a simple link to the beta you make a user account with your email. It’s very, very easy. Um, you can run back tests, see how you do.

1:29:06 If that goes well, you run some paper tests, see how that goes. We’ll have live ready in a couple of weeks, and we’re just adding exchange by exchange. Um, you know, I’d say we’re going a little slower just simply because it’s a trading platform. There’s no margin for errors. So, you know, by the time everyone else sees it live, it’s been tested 10 billion times over.

1:29:31 We’re, we’re not allowing them to make mistakes. Like, mistakes are made internally. If we’re going to find a bug, we’re going to try to expose it before you guys all get access to that. That’s why the live is taking a little longer.

1:29:42 Brian Rose: Nice.

1:29:42 Good. I’m glad you’re taking that time, Drew. Uh, super excited about what you built. Congrats on what you’ve built and putting the time in and offering all these incredible, you know, tools like you said to normal everyday person. It’s one thing to talk about democratizing access to trading.

1:30:00 It’s another thing to actually do it. And I can see this happening. And I can see some dude in the Philippines that’s brain rich and cash poor connecting with some trust fund kid in LA who’s rich, cash-rich, and brain poor. And everybody like creating all these amazing moments.

1:30:15 Drew Katz: I didn’t want to say that, but that’s kind of what it is.

1:30:18 I said it. But that’s, that’s the type of guy I was thinking of was like some guy who’s got a lot of money who maybe isn’t necessarily as savvy as, um, someone from a country who, you know, what they’re known for being smart in math. There’s a lot of countries that are brilliant people, and, you know, have some of the best tech schools and whatever in the world, but they didn’t come from the right family or the right country or city, and they’ll never have this opportunity.

1:30:46 But if you have a computer and you have an account at any of these major exchanges, you can build a copy trading model very easily. You don’t need money to do it. You just need to be smart. Um, and I think connecting that dot, that is what democratizes it the most, because then you do have, you know, I mean, that it would be a great story. I would love to see someone from, from one of these, you know, more impoverished backgrounds becoming like, you know, a success story.

1:31:13 Brian Rose: That would be amazing. I think you’re going to make a bunch of those for sure. All right, I’m jumping in, and I’m going to start creating models and doing some copy trading, and then also start posting this on social, and, I just want to show people what we’re doing. Drew, I’m super excited to be on this journey with you. It’s, it’s really getting me back to what I did as a kid and just back to those trading markets, which I’ve stayed away from for so long, because look, I’m smart enough to know that if I tried to trade crypto right now with my personal time, I would fall flat on my face, and so I’ve always stayed away from it, which is a shame, because I watch the markets, and I need to know what they’re doing, but I, I just can’t take action, and it’s a shame, because I feel like I’m missing out, and so now I feel like I can do that and still run my life and run my business, and that’s a powerful thing.

1:32:01 Drew Katz: That’s, that’s the beauty of it. I think for guys that know how to trade, actually, a lot of people that I know know how to trade, but they don’t have time to trade. Like, the few free hours you have, I’m not trading, right? Like, I get, like, I get that. So, you know, if you know how to trade, you know, what do I look for in a chart or macro-wise, and it makes me want to buy, dot dot, asset class, and then you can easily, it’s not like you’re trying to code it to quantify it.

1:32:30 You’re like clicking a drop-down and dragging over. It’s called whatever it is. It’s not very hard to disseminate. I mean, it’s called RSI. You know, I want to do an RSI clip.

1:32:41 And then, you know, the button’s called signal. You drag it over. It’s, it’s, it’s pretty explanatory. So, I think that’s the beauty of it. You have all your time back, and then, you know, you do monitor it every now and again, and there’s lots of risk systems in place, not just on your level, but on our level.

1:32:57 So, like, if it looks like you’ve done something silly, um, we’re not going to let you execute a trade if you’ve inverted certain um data or indicators. We’re going to break like, not break it, but we’re going to uh flag it, flash red, and you’re not going to be able to go. Um, and if it looks like you maybe built a really bad model and you’re getting liquidated, we may, you know, push alert you so you know what’s up, and you can fix it. That’s why there’s kill switch, in case you do decide to make some a little bit too risky stuff.

1:33:25 Brian Rose: Nice, man. It’s incredible features. Wow. All right, man. The future’s now.

1:33:30 I’m excited. I think everybody should go right now. Check it out. Set up that account. And I can’t wait for you to be live as well.

1:33:37 So, look, man. We’re pumped for the journey. Can’t wait to see where you take this place. And I’m excited actually to get back into trading because I haven’t done it for so long. It’s very exciting.

1:33:44 Drew Katz: It gives people that have not been trading the opportunity to get back into it, and maybe people that are not traders, you know, to try it out. And then obviously the traders themselves, I think they’re going to love it, because everyone’s looking for platforms out there, and not many of them are delivering actual quality. They’re front running. They all have their own whatever issues or fees. Our fees are pretty straightforward and small.

1:34:08 There are none. So I think that, you know, makes it pretty easy to see, you know, it’s worth trying. You have nothing to lose. There’s no cost. It’s just maybe you found a solution that’s going to make you a lot of money.

1:34:20 Brian Rose: Amazing, man. All right. I love it. Let’s sit down here maybe in a year from now and find out where we are. Until then, I’m going to jump in.

1:34:27 Congrats on the success. Congrats to the future. And we’re really glad we’re on board with you, Drew.

1:34:31 Drew Katz: Thanks. Absolutely.

1:34:32 All right, Rob. I appreciate it.