Q&A Sessions with Steve Nauta, Co-Founder of Daticks
Steve Nauta, Co-Founder of Daticks meets FinanceFeeds for a Q&A session to discuss his personal journey into the industry and his views on where the industry is headed.
As the next installment in this exciting and cutting edge new series on FinanceFeeds, “Industry Influencers” takes a look at the entrepreneurs and companies which are making great steps in the FX and electronic trading industry in terms of innovation, creativity and leadership.
In the first part, FinanceFeeds sits down with the CEOs of this industry to find out more about them, how they got where they are today and what their thoughts are on the way that this business will move forward.
Full name: Steve Nauta
Company: Daticks
Time with company: 1 year
Years in the industry: 8
Tell us a little about yourself
I began working in the financial markets on the trading desk with GFT. Fast forward a bit and I went more institutional by starting a CTA. My areas of focus were capital raising and analytics. This is where I truly got interested in using data to answer some very important questions for traders.
What was your journey like to get to where you are today?
As I mentioned above, I initially got into the trading scene on the trading desk at GFT. I worked with retail (newer) traders as well as some of their institutional clients.
After I left GFT, I started an Introducing Broker offering futures and forex to our clients. Our niche was offering custom programming services. As many Introducing Brokers can attest to, I had two difficulties, 1) traders opening accounts and doing nothing or worse 2) traders trading too much, losing their money and closing their accounts.
After seeing the issues with the Introducing Broker, I started a Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) to help manage client funds. We focused on German and UK bonds along with some currencies. I spent most of my time analyzing trader’s trading data looking for ways to increase returns and ultimately when to shut traders off.
This analysis of traders really got me excited about using trader’s data to maximize their potential. I started Daticks to automate this process for traders showing traders how to maximize their trading performance solely by using specific metrics to know when to trade larger, smaller or not at all.
What are some of the things you enjoy outside of work?
I enjoy being active and outdoors, as well as reading. Being an entrepreneur I also find myself thinking a lot about ways to use technology and data to solve problems.
One word that describes you?
Driven
What was your biggest challenge to date that you’ve had to overcome?
I would easily say, learning when to rely on outside vendors and when to build our own technology. Our launch took longer than expected due to using outside technology that did not quite handle what we are trying to accomplish. Finally, it was clear to handle all of this in-house.
What are your thoughts on where the industry is heading?
I see technology and data playing much larger roles on the industry than in the past. I see traders choosing brokers more based on additional product offerings than just the trading platform or published spreads.
Retail traders, specifically will be looking for more automated solutions for strategy creation or copying. They will demand more along the lines of “prove it” when it comes to performance numbers after losing money with solutions in the past that were either inadequate or worse, manipulated. Along with this they will require more data showing them why and when a strategy is profitable.
Brokers will continue to look to technology as a way to manage their risk and lower their costs. Content strategies built around new niche product offerings in the early stages will pay off greatly as these solutions gain traction. This, instead of waiting to jump on the bandwagon after the industry is saturated and paying a premium to rank and acquire traders from them will show much higher ROI.
