Looking back at 2017 – the year in review

Looking back at 2017
- How technology, 5 years in the making…
- Powers Alignment
The Power of Technology
- Entire private site. The new UX makes DARWINs trade-able everywhere in the interface. The UX & technology is a better foundation to add and improve future functionality.
- Risk manager. Intervenes less than the previous, but decisively when needed. Default VaR scaled down to 10% VaR.
- Investable attributes. Added 6 (not all were new, we unbundled some sub-algos). Re-coded all 12 for efficiency, from scratch. This is crucial to eventually analyse strategies trade-by-trade – instead of end-of-day feedback.
- DARWIN limit orders: Buy Limits, Buy stop, stop losses & take profits. DARWINs are increasingly trade-able!
- Candle charts
- Order execution disclosure, providing transparency
- Lots of lower level improvements.
Believe it or not, most product improvements in the second half of the year went under the hood:
- Improved stability, robustness and future scalability,
- Done lots of efforts to comply with MiFID2,
- Worked on an instant bank payment gateway,
… All while ironing out a zillion tiny bugs – thank you EVERYONE for your patience with the process.
We’d be nowhere without it.
The Power of Alignment
- Traders supply DARWINs (their intellectual property in form of trades by their strategy). Traders earn a 20% success fee from,
- DARWIN “Investors” who replicate trader IP – retaining 80% of trading profits
- Good traders only join if there’s investors,
- Investors only stay with good traders
- The Darwinian capital allocation worked. 350 strategies (about 10% of the active trader base) received at least 1 allocation. This attracted enough good traders to get things in motion!
- Success fees paid out to traders topped USD 1 Million in 2017
- Individual traders earn respectable sums – both monthly & cumulative
- 2018 will add Darwinian Dividends to the mix