The Wolf Of All Streets - Building The World's Largest Trading Community with Pierce Crosby, General Manager of TradingView

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

Pierce Crosby came to the crypto community with years of experience building large scale communities for different social platforms. He helped transform TradingView into a hub of social networking, idea sharing, and community interaction above and beyond just trading. TradingView is now the 125th largest website in the world, and Pierce has big plans to bring the platform to every finance circle on the globe.  Scott Melker and Pierce Crosby further discuss hundreds of thousands of dollars in Memecoin, turning TradingView into one of the largest websites in the world, who is MagicPoopCannon, blowing up trading accounts, comparing TradingView to Spotify and SoundCloud, investing in the Tesla ICO, managing the velocity of DeFi, TradingView desktop version, positive and negative community development and more. ––– RSK/IOV Sovryn is a decentralised Bitcoin trading and lending platform and one of the first Bitcoin-native DeFi platforms. Earn interest on your Bitcoin and get paid for lending assets, with up to 5x leverage on long and short trades using USDT, BTC and bitcoin-backed stablecoins. All with no KYC. Click the link below to get your first month’s trading fees for free. Be one of the first 100 and claim a $100 bonus! Visit Sovryn.app/wolf for more info. --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 9.5% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account. --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe.This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

This episode is sponsored by Voyager and Sovereign. Stay tuned for more information on both later in the episode. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast. When crypto traders think of technical analysis, one platform immediately comes to mind, TradingView. What you may not know is that it's actually the 125th largest website in the entire world. Behind the massive success of this fascinating company is today's guest, Pierce Crosby, TradingView's general manager. Pierce

found his way to TradingView through an unconventional career path, including radio, writing, social networking, and investing. The common denominator for Pierce and TradingView that I look forward to exploring is their fascination and curiosity with markets, along with how a successful community is built. Pierce, Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. Long time. Thanks, Scott. So before we get into the questions,

once again, you are listening to the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast. We're here two times every single week. I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin finance, trading, art, music, sports, and politics. And this show is powered by BlockWorks Group, a media company with over 20 podcasts in their network. You can check them out at blockworksgroup.io.

And if you like the podcast and follow me on Twitter, then you should check out my website, join my newsletter, check out my YouTube, doing a lot of things. You can find all that at thewolfofallstreets.io. Now that we're done with all of that. So man, I heard that you have a very special relationship with meme coin that i would really like to explore i have a special relationship with the original meme coin which is doge like it's my favorite thing i've ever traded in history i call it my favorite asset of all time because it's so dumb and so profitable and so easy to trade so i'd love to hear your meme meme coin story yeah i mean it's uh it's a, it's a great one. And again, thanks for having me. And I'm a big fan of the show. I listen every week and broadly speaking, the, the candidness of, um,

of the interviews is, is the best thing about it. You know, I think a lot of people are super formal on, on these things, but I think the more, you know, like weird random stories you can get into, it's the best way to like learn, you know, how some of the things are. I appreciate that. So, A, I've heard you're the king of weird random stories. And B, it's actually an evolution, I think, of a podcast. When I started, it was very formal and I had my questions in advance. I knew exactly. And then I sort of threw that all out the window one day and started just having conversations. So, I'm glad that that's being reflected, but I would love to hear about your relationship with meme coin. So Jordan Leal is one of the teams at ConsenSys. And I guess he does biz dev, corp dev for them. He built a landing page on a random Friday that was basically

the coin generator. And the idea being is, you know, you could quickly use this piece of code and generate a new coin and ship it immediately. This was basically during the heat of the summer. And we had this huge explosion of DeFi and the whole DeFi movement. So everybody's staking, everybody's looking to leverage their staking by doing, you know, other kinds of, you know,

loan opportunities on top of, you know, different coins and chains. And so I basically was sent a Telegram channel, which was Jordan's, that he set up on a Friday. And quickly, the platform had actually been completely co-opted by a bunch of developers. And it was a joke in the first place, right? So there was no actual code that could build, you know, coins right out the gate. But a developer in the channel actually said, well, I can just build one right now if you guys want. And within 20 to 30 minutes, he had basically sent out a listserv so you could put in your Ethereum address. And more or less,

he airdropped everybody, 300 meme coin out of the blue. And it cost him something like, you know, 120 bucks or something like that, which he, you know, sold it back to pay his costs. And, and so all of a sudden everybody that had been randomly invited to this telegram channel had 300 meme coin. And, you know, this is a Friday night. I think the timing was around, let's see, I was over in California at the time. It was probably like 7 p.m. And somehow, I mean, you know how it works on the weekends with crypto. So like all of a sudden, you know, there's a thousand people in the chat room. And it's really just like growing in real time. So a couple of people started building memes, literally like jokes on the joke. It was kind of like meme-ception. It was, it was hilarious.

Next thing you know, I mean, you know, people are asking where can they buy? How can they buy? And the whole joke was like, don't buy a meme. This is a joke. Wasn't that actually the web address or something? It was like, don't buy meme.com or something. Yeah, exactly.

And I mean, that all came later. This was literally just organic. They were just like, this is stupid. Let's do something ridiculous. And I mean, next thing you know, we were sitting on like a hundred bucks and then all of a sudden it's a thousand bucks and all of a sudden it's, I mean, at the peak, I think memeeme got up to like $1,200 per coin or something like that. By the time, you know, I'd actually sold most of it. And so I was just watching it. But absolutely incredible. And really just, you know, completely shell-shocked me as to... It's very reminiscent of the ICO days, but...

You mean when you have nothing and it turns into $360,000 overnight? Yes. That sounds reminiscent of a certain thing. If I did held to the, to the actual absolute peak, it would be 360 just straight out the gate. And the best part about it was that it was equally distributed. So you didn't have whales. Um, so everybody had 300 and so it was like a perfectly distributed leisure.

It was really awesome. But, um, yeah, anyways awesome but um yeah anyways that's my that's my story about me it's a fantastic one and uh jordan's jordan's amazing too i mean it's amazing that is so that is so 2020 and so summer of 2020 and so d5 boom and bubble of 2020 is that you can create something that's literally nothing and make money out of that. I don't know what that says about this space. It's a fun experiment. But can you imagine a meme stock getting listed on like NASDAQ that did nothing and everyone got the money for free? Yeah, exactly.

I don't know. I mean, but, you know, now they've pivoted to be like the coin for the art world. So, I mean, I know. That's NFT. Yeah. to be like the coin for the art world. So, I mean, I know... That's NFT, yeah. We talked to Blau the other day and it was pretty interesting to hear like that intersection of art, music and culture. And yeah, like the meme culture

is now kind of being pushed into the art culture in a way. And if they can be like the underlying, you know, coin for NFT projects, it's pretty cool. Well, it's awesome that they found a real use case. So that doesn't literally go to zero while some people are, some people are holding it. And yeah, NFT is a whole other conversation that I love. And I had Blau obviously on the podcast, he's a friend and, uh, had an incredible conversation about that. So I want to like pivot a bit just into trading view. I was actually really shocked when I read doing research that it was the 125th largest website in the world. Not that I didn't think

you guys were huge, but that's massive, right? I mean, that's massive. Why is that? Because there's not that many traders on the planet, are there? Maybe there are, maybe I'm mistaken. I just kind of felt like traders were a small insular community. Certainly not enough to, you know, drive more traffic than some of the biggest websites in the world. Yeah. Well, I mean, to be honest, it shocks me a little bit every day

when I look at that number. Broadly speaking, it comes down to your frame of reference. And I mean, you and I both sit here in the, I guess you're still in the US, right? You're not over in the Canons yet. I have been. So if not over in the canons yet. If not for COVID and having a baby, maybe.

So broadly speaking, like your frame of reference in the U S is that there's about 40 million people who have something invested. So meaning, you know, they have stocks or they have a 401k or something like that. So, I mean, from that like lens, you got to think about, okay, well, how many of these people actually are internet savvy? A small fraction of that. And how many of them are actually active traders? The small fraction of that. So you're looking at like a couple million users and it's like, all right, well, how do you build a business around that? And well, you got to zoom out and actually think, okay, we're actually a global

platform. And for those who don't know, there's TradingView.com, but there's also TradingView China, there's TradingView Japan, there's TradingView Portuguese, Spanish. And so we have about 25 different language versions that all operate independent of each other. And so while TradingView.com has kind of grown over time, you know, mostly with the audience in the U.S. and the U.K., we've had these huge explosions of traffic around the world for places that basically don't have any comparable access to technology. I mean, you know, in the U.S., we're probably the most advanced in terms of, you know, financial tech and availability. And, you know, this is like the 90s boom of the E-trades of the world and what have you. There's always been technology here to invest.

But technology in, say, Brazil is very, very kind of uncommon in terms of the scale of data you can get, the scale of charting you can get, visualizations you can get. And so we were kind of going from zero to one in a lot of these countries where they really had nothing. We're bringing kind of the scale and expertise that we built here in the US to these markets that basically were just like shell-shocked by what they could get. And as you know, I mean, 80% of the product is free, right? So you get so much information and not even pay a dollar. People were just clamoring to it all over the place. So U.S. is still our largest business and probably about 40% of the total. But that means 60% of that is international and growing at an insanely fast pace.

So, you know, like India wasn't even our top 10 country last year. India is now number two for us. Wow. And really, it's still tiny. I mean, it's really just getting started. A few billion people over there. Yeah, exactly. And the same goes for China. I mean, we've really barely scratched the surface in China. But for those who know kind of traditional equity markets, China's very gambling culture or very interested in this active investing lifestyle.

And that translates to places like Macau and places like Singapore and Hong Kong. Yeah, I mean, we've barely gotten started there. And yeah, so I mean, if you really use that as your frame of reference, I mean, the total addressable is going to be in the millions and millions rather than, you know, maxing out at 5 million investors in the U.S. or something like that. And so that's really the story, I think, of how we got to 125. But I mean, to be clear, even last year, we were about 300. So in the last, you know, since the pandemic started, we've already run up another, you know, 175 places. That makes a lot of sense. Since the pandemic started, we've already run up another, you know, 175 places. That makes a lot of sense. Like the growth during the pandemic makes so much sense to me because obviously you

touched on it. Listen, there's a gambling element to trading. Of course, you know, you said that sort of culturally Chinese, but I mean, people sitting at home with nothing to do and they can't, and even the gamblers can't find things to gamble on. Like sports were gone. And so of course, you know, they find this. But what I find really interesting is that, you know, you sort of touched on E-Trade

and all these platforms. There have always been platforms where you could trade, but that's not really what you guys do, right? You're obviously offering an ability to chart and find trades and find information and through APIs, you can trade on exchanges, but you're not an exchange. So those really aren't your competitors. You have to actually find people not only who want to invest or trade money, but you have to find the ones that care enough to actually go and chart and seek that information. So I just find it still astounding that there's that many people out there. It's great.

I think it's so good for all of us. Yeah. And one thing to think about that people don't really know. So we do integrate a lot of these trading firms and we're kind of just getting started in that. It's like an initiative that they actually brought me on to kind of launch two years ago. And I mean, broadly speaking, a lot of web trading firms, like, you know, whether it's a trade station or a Wanda, they actually

are deprioritizing their own platforms because they actually think the trading view will be the number one place that people trade from. And so we started as kind of a research and analysis product, but then quickly we're actually shifting into being like the full service. You know, we'll never be a broker ourselves and it's kind of like against our thesis, but if we can actually provide trading through these, you know, best in class partners, I mean, boom, it's everything you need, right? Yeah. It's a one-stop shop for everything, but I think a huge element of it is the social aspect, right? I mean, it's a social media platform as well as a trading platform.

And so obviously it keeps, I would imagine, users engaged. It keeps them on the site. It keeps them interacting with one another as opposed to just kind of coming and looking at a blank slate, right? Yeah, totally. And that's the thing is, I mean, brokers are inherently limited in what they can do from a regulatory standpoint or compliance standpoint. So you'd never see TD Ameritrade launch a social network, right? But because we are kind of this market neutral platform, yeah, I mean, you basically take the training wheels off. I mean, people chat all day, every day. And they're also sharing kind of investment ideas or kind of longer form research. But we make it a

very open framework so that there's no requirement like you have to talk about this as an investment or this as a trading idea. It's just like come and hang people you know make it what they will i mean some people are you know in there you know trading a specific commodity every day it's like a little niche um and then other people are looking at you know general market trends or news or what have you i mean you know as well as i mean there's millions of different types of traders and so oh yeah you try to kind of like keep it as open as possible so that people can find their little thing and then just nerd out on that until until until they're white get off the computer like for a lot of us it's sort of like our equivalent of adult video games or something certainly it's just kind of where you hang out and play but i'm just laughing in my head because

i remember i don't know now but like 2017 the biggest trader on TradingView was like Magic Poop Cannon. Yeah. Right. And I used to just laugh and wonder how that was possible. We could take our space seriously when the Magic Poop Cannon was the most popular trader, but I guess that's what happens obviously with the social aspect is that you get sort of the YouTuber types who are great at engagement, who rise to the top, whether they're the best or not the best, but you know, that's the social side and not necessarily the trading side. And it's not financial advice, obviously, but. No, no, but it's, it's a good

point. And, you know, I think working in kind of social networks for, for a while now, I mean, I can tell you there's, there's an element of power law to all of, um, all of the internet, right? I mean, unfortunately, the way it works is, you know, the person with the largest megaphone gets the most traction, right? And that's kind of the natural state of the internet, right? I mean, I always look to Reddit because it's the most distributed, but you quickly realize that Reddit is actually, you know, 10% of the users generate more than 90% of the content. Pareto principle. Yeah.

That's, that's general power law. And so we, we were very much trying to ship that away from kind of these, you know, power users to be more kind of level headed, if you will. And, and there is kind of a value in this element of discovery as well. Because, you know, I mean, much like, I don't know if you use Spotify, but for me, like the discover feature in Spotify is kind of like the golden ticket, because, you know, otherwise, I would just operate in this lens of this is the music I like. But in fact, you know, Spotify uses a bunch of different algorithms, more than five, in fact, that all compound on each other to understand what music do you like?

What music do your friends like? Is there some kind of cascading overlap there? If you have that in kind of combination with other musicians, you know, they'll give you kind of recommendations. And so we actually think that, you know, from a trading perspective, you know, you have a trading style, this person has a trading style, we could actually start generating these interesting overlaps between various parties, rather than having it just be, you know, this guy posts the most hilarious charts, therefore, you know, he's going to get the most engagement, which is... But that's such an interesting comparison, Spotify, obviously, like my background is in DJing. And so I watched, you know, music discovery evolve from literally like you had to have a guy at the record store who like every, it was late, late nineties for me. So I had, you know, I had a

friend at the record store and every week he would pull the stuff he thought I liked and put it aside for me. I would listen to it and I would buy whatever I wanted. And then obviously slowly we got to MP3s and it became like iTunes, but more music blogs. And you would dig into music blogs, the ones you liked that sort of had your taste and you would find the music you liked and then go try to find it. Spotify destroyed all of that. And Spotify understands my musical taste better than I do. So you guys are effectively hacking our brains, just like Spotify are, and then giving us exactly what you know we want before we know we want it, right? I mean, at the end of the day, that's the goal.

I mean, that's the goal. And, you know, thinking about a platform and like what our purpose is, I think that, you know, trying to help people learn more about themselves is kind of, uh, kind of an interesting thing that, you know, most people wouldn't think that, you know, a trading platform would, would, uh, would focus on, but, but again, that's what kind of differentiates us from, you know, just like a broker or a media website is we're trying to make this personal. And, and to be honest, I mean, you know, you know, as well as I do, I mean, like trading is kind of a lonely sport, right? And so make it, um, you know, somewhat collaborative, right? Like it's more of an interactive game,

multiplayer, right? That's the way I think of it is, you know, how can we do multiplayer? Um, then, um, then yeah, we've served our purpose, you know, we're not just giving you, you know, sick charts. I mean, there's, there's a lot more to it than that. Charts are sick though. And like right? And like, you know, I found one of the most engaging things early about you because I think I can't remember the name of the other platform, Coinage maybe that I tried, something like that.

And like, it was so much less customizable and didn't have sort of those social aspects. And it immediately turned me off and I immediately was drawn to TradingView because I could change the colors of my charts and do all these things. It's just like, you really understood what people wanted. And I even find being able to differentiate the color of my charts differentiates me as

a trader and people recognize my charts on Twitter. It's been a huge thing for engagement and growth. So even those simple things, I think, but I think it all leads back here now to community development, which I think you have a long history of, I understand. And I know that you mentioned the Anderson Horowitz theme, and I'm curious as to what that is when it refers to community development. Well, yeah, it's an interesting one. I was talking about this on Twitter the other day. It's really funny if you tap into VC Twitter, how quickly people want to engage with you, because either they're a VC themselves or they basically want to attract the attention of the various VCs.

They need money. Either you're looking for money or you haven't. So I was talking about how it's really interesting that Andreessen, which is kind of the darling of Silicon Valley, has most recently launched this huge kind of profile on how social is kind of the hidden gem for all successful products in modern technology and, you know, how there's like layers around a given product that create moats that make it really hard to displace. And I thought it was, I mean, a great piece in the sense that if Andreessen's taking this seriously, it's like a huge validator for the last, you know, eight or so years of my life. But it's really interesting because, you know, before my time at TradingView, I worked at a company called StockTwits, which very much was basically chat for traders. And that was the core purpose. And we at the time didn't really understand what we were building.

We were just kind of creating a cool place for people to hang out and talk about stocks, but the value of networks and communities built around anything. Music is a great example because I always think of the SoundCloud community and how it's insane the amount of content that people are commenting, are posting mixtapes, are recutting other people's music, et cetera. And if SoundCloud didn't have those social features, would you even hang out on SoundCloud? It's like in the same way, it seems kind of totally distinctly different businesses,

but actually you realize the social layer is kind of the core differentiator between success and failures. And for finance specifically, I mean, you know, I think that a lot of people just approach it like best in class tools and that's all, but, but really, you know, what you want is that personal validation and, and kind of, to be honest, what I call it is like a support network because, you know, we know in the trading world, you know,

there's success and then there's failure. And, you know, surviving those downturns is kind of the most important part of anybody's journey in investing. And so if you have a group that you can coalesce with, and to be honest, in StockTwits, you know, we covered, say, U.S. companies specifically. But if somebody was trading like a small cap and literally got blown up, there would immediately be a network of people that also got blown out of the water. And they basically coalesce around that and like talk about how like, you know, I'm going to make it. I'm going to make it. I'm going to start, you know, I mean, a lot of them are like absolute bag holders, but, but the fact that they had somebody to chat to about that was, um, was kind of a really, you know, interesting, um, nuance, right. Cause I mean, before that you just blow up and then you close your fucking account and crypto, we call them passionate community members,

right? You start as a trader, then you become an investor. Then you become a passionate community member when it goes down 95% and you're afraid to sell. SoundCloud is another amazing corollary for what you guys do. My whole career was SoundCloud as a musician, right? Because you were able, like you said, to get this feedback loop. You would post something, people would comment, you knew it was good. You'd make more like it, you'd see it grow. And the death of my music career was when SoundCloud removed my account for

copyright infringement. Right. And so, I mean, it was very much a, you know, I was very much no counter party risk. That's your whole brand, right. It's like built into that network, right? Yep. Yeah. So, and I can see, and I always joke that the reason I love charts so much is it reminds me of being an Ableton or Logic or Pro Tools, kind of like the same hacks and the same sort of you're just staring at a screen and moving things around. And so for me, it's just very familiar. And thinking about what you guys do in SoundCloud now, it makes so much sense.

I just never really thought about it in context. So it's so interesting for you to put it that way. Yeah. No, I mean, the thing is, so most of the team here, so, you know, I'd love to have you just chat with the CEO at some point too, but most of the team here comes from very much a technology heavy background. You know, before this, they actually built the core technology for a company called eSignal, which was a big broker back in the day.

They also worked for TradeStation for a long time, building the core coding software for TradeStation, like very in the weeds stuff that is essential for traders, but they approach it purely from kind of a technology standpoint. Whereas when I joined, I came from the social world and I actually brought over one of my close friends to work with us as well from the social side of things. And, you know, the combination is pretty incredible because they have, I mean, we have 170 developers now and, you know, they are constantly cranking out incredible products. But now they see it not just as a single player game, but a multiplayer game. And that's kind of, I think what we really bring to the table is kind of, you know, enlightening them to the fact that this is, this is actually like a collaborative software. And you mentioned like Pro Tools or something like that. You know, back in the day when I was a journalist, you know, the standard in the industry was, what's it called? It's like a production software.

Well, Final Cut Pro, but Avid. Avid is the one I'm thinking of. So Avid in television production, which is- Yeah, you needed the whole board. It was like a full station. And then Final Cut, obviously, you just needed your computer and it destroyed Avid. I mean, an Avid setup was like tens of thousands of dollars.

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Yeah, but the reason Avid still exists is that it's multiplayer and and that's the inside of production studios it's super necessary to have these multiplayer software so that you know you can you know produce a piece and then ship it to another part of the team you know they bring it in color correct it they send it off to production but it's all done inside of this avid platform i think of the the same probably with like the Adobe products, you know, start with a single player and then you can start sharing it and stuff like that. So, so yeah, that multiplayer is kind of what we've been focused on now. And yeah, I mean, obviously we're refining the core charts all the time, but, but building that multiplayer layer is, it's been a pretty cool

project to work on. It's amazing to do it at the scale that we're doing it at too, because we got to build multiplayer for Japan. We got to build multiplayer for, for China, for, you know, for Indonesia, for who knew that the Philippines was such a hot place for trading, but dude, it's huge. It's enormous. Dollar and a dream, man. You know, it's anywhere that people think that they can, uh, have a disproportionate chance to get wealthy with a little bit of money. They're wrong, but you know, that's where you generally find it. And you touched on StockTwits. I know you were there for years. And I know Howard Lindzen is like a very famous hedge fund manager, investor, right? And that's his thing. So I have to ask, were you into finance before this, or is that where you really kind of,

you know, got your, your training in finance, working for someone as legendary as that, and then also engaging with traders probably all day because of your role? Yeah. Well, I mean, so no, Howard discovered me because of my previous work in finance and in the space. Funny enough, we actually met on Twitter, which is the power of social networks again. But I kid you not, literally, we met on Twitter. And when I was in college, obviously, being a young, budding entrepreneur, I thought, okay, well, I can trade my way out of student debt and manage to blow myself up twice. But, you know, learned a lot of lessons and obviously, you know, trading on a small enough account that, you know, it didn't kind of wipe me out completely. Here I am today. But no, as a

result, I was pretty early on Twitter kind of, you know, again, looking for interesting trading ideas. As a result, I talked to Howard probably 2009, 2010, right after the financial crisis, which is when Stocktricks was really being born. I went a different route than actually going straight into the investing world. I became a reporter, I basically wanted to report on the industry, more than actually being a market participant myself. And so, you know, I kind of had a background in it, you know, I'd done it all through school. I was actually the founder of our television station at my, my college campus. And, but yeah, I mean,

so it was always interesting to me, but I never really had the guts to like step into the ring and like, you know, do that full time or go work at an investment bank. It just didn't really strike me as something that I was really capable of, to be honest. And reporting, you know, and writing is much more of like a consuming process. You're just like pulling in all this information. And then the job really is just to consolidate that into a tight format, which seemed easier at the time. And that's kind of what I did for working at Reuters and working at a couple other publications.

But, you know, at some point in time, I was really thinking about it and looking at the long term of a job like Reuters. I mean, you basically sit at the same desk until the person next to you dies. I mean, at the end of the day, like the only way you grow up in a company like that is, you know, when somebody retires or, or leaves for another job. And so I was kind of thinking high level, like, all right, well, I could do this for another 10 years, um, just grinding away, which is what really good reporters do. You know, they really love just writing and that's it. But I kind of thought, you know, I wanted to do something a little more, you know, dynamic and see how fast I could grow.

And so being the first employee at StockTwits in New York back in 2012. Yeah, I mean, it was a great opportunity. And, you know, I'm hugely indebted to Howard for that because I had no kind of business background. And he said, you know, I mean, give it a shot, see what you can do. And, you know, I mean, that company now is also still booming. I mean, they have, you know, 45 people.

They're doing great revenues. I'm still an investor, of course. Of mean, they have, you know, 45 people. They're doing great revenues. I'm still an investor, of course. Of course, that's awesome. So it's been a great one, but yeah. So you tried trading, you tried trading and you blew up your account a couple of times. And I know the answer to this, but do you remember what you blew it up on

and what the mistake was that you made? Yeah, this is really funny actually. And super timely. Tesla and SolarCity. SolarCity. Oh my God. What a trade, Rick. What a trade. I mean, how funny that like, you know, time horizon, right? Like it's really, it comes down to, you know, what are you doing trying to pick up pennies in front of a steamroller? I mean, I definitely thought that the active trader approach was right for me. But I mean, it's a full time job. And you know, I mean, I was at the time, like doing other jobs and like, you know, having side hustles and, you know,

also living in beautiful California, not really having the motivation to like, you know, just do this day in day out. I mean, it's a system, it's a process. You've got to be super vigilant about it. And yeah, so I mean, you know, over time I've evolved into more kind of like a momentum kind of investor, but I mean, to be day in, day out, just, you know, click trading and looking for those levels and making that repeatable. Yeah, I mean, I definitely blew myself up on Tesla. And were you like, but like, were you shorting it or you were just way too early in stopping out? Yeah, way too early playing earnings

and basically, yeah, just playing intraday levels. I mean, the charts back in the day were TradeStation charts. I remember having the charts back in the day were TradeStation charts. I remember having the downloadable software, which to me is like still amazing to think that we would, you know, download these huge softwares to run locally versus run everything in the web. But yeah, basically putting on position trades and looking for a 0.5% uptick or downtick and then take profit, move on. You were scalping the hell out of it. Yeah. Imagine if you had just left all that money in Tesla 10 years ago. I mean, my good friend, his dad actually put in 40 grand when they IPO'd and hasn't sold a dollar of it. And yeah, so retirement fund is just there.

Now his kids have a trust fund and his kids' kids have a trust fund. Congrats. It's so crazy. We all have, anyone who's traded looks back and sees these assets that have done a thousand times or whatever since and has that feeling. But, you know, it's impossible to really maintain any sort of positive mentality if you view trading that way. I mean, you know, whatever, at least I didn't put in my entire net worth, right?

So here we are today. I mean, you know, this year has been incredible, you know, on a personal note, just for, you know, investing, but I think it is for everybody. Right. I mean, it seems delusional how, like, I actually know something's wrong in the markets when like, I'm doing really well. Like I feel suspicious. But yeah, I mean, same with the crypto world. I mean, I remember we actually invited Fred Wilson to speak at this StockFits conference back in, it was called Stocktoberfest, I kid you not, literally. It actually made no sense because it was in May.

Well, we initially had one in october so that did make sense but then we launched a sequel in new york and in may and it was big flashy conference we spent ridiculous amounts of money on the space um somehow i've managed to like squeeze water out of the rock and like we made a profit on it but it's a huge waste of cash i've never kind of done that scale of event before and never do it again. In New York. In New York alone. Yeah, exactly. So Fred, Fred, Fred came to speak. He's a longtime friend of Howard's and he, you know,

had just actually made his investment in Coinbase. And so he, you know, got on stage. He's very kind of nimble about talking specifically about a specific asset, right? Like whether it's... At the time, it was basically Litecoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin, that was it really. And so he said, I really can't say where things are going to go or anything like that, but I can tell you that 5% of your net wealth in one of these assets is the best way to just at least approach the market and learn about it. And I mean, wow. I mean, what a kind of foresight. So, I mean, I watched, you know, that and I was like, okay, that's interesting. I bought it. And then that summer, I mean, we had this huge fallout from the 2017, all the way down to God in 2018, what it was trading at like

less than 4,000 or something like that. But here we are now that's all relevant water under the bridge. If you're an investor, it never happened. That's the beauty of being an investor is that, you know, probably just gave you an opportunity to buy some cheaper before it went up. So if I, you talk about the Coinbase IPO, I got an email from one of my good friends yesterday who was friends with Brian Armstrong way back and had an opportunity to invest in Coinbase for 10,000 bucks. And I think 2012, when it was coming out of Y Combinator, my friend was just like, I didn't understand it, whatever. And I mean, my friend is very level-headed. I got this email from him yesterday. That was just like a string of bad words. It was like $21 million in IPO on $10,000. I'm such an

idiot. I'm such a moron, but that's the same thing. It's that same feeling that you were there early. And then, you know, but like $10,000 is a whole lot of money back then. Oh man. That's so funny. Yeah. But I think, you know, clearly everybody has a story like that. So I want to ask you is TradingView, you guys are so huge. Is it primarily crypto traders or is that just crypto traders? You think it's primarily crypto traders? Well, I think about it like this.

I actually do think that the majority of the crypto world is on TradingView, but really the crypto world is still small. I mean, on a real basis, right? So you got to think about kind of the larger spectrum of kind of traders and investors. So today, the way we look at it is we basically analyze what's on somebody's watch list on TradingView, and then use that as inference to, you know, how focused are they on crypto or futures or forex or equities. So right now, about 35% of the audience is crypto first. And that's really like their dominant asset. That's what they trade the most. That's what they're watching every day. These are the type of people that sign in and then look at spreads between different coins or look at intraday charts, etc.

All with the interest of trading the asset. But yeah, that leaves another two-thirds of the network for equities and FX. And equities is still the dominant player. But I mean, it's really interesting because in certain markets like, you know, something like the Philippines, as an example, almost all of them are trading FX and crypto. Whereas, you know, in the U.S., it's predominantly an equities industry. And therefore, you know, the majority of our traffic is going to be equities oriented. But yeah, I mean, and then, you know, for Europe of our traffic is going to be equities oriented. But yeah, I mean, and then, you know, for Europe, they love FX. They haven't even really discovered, you know, crypto comparatively, which I think is really interesting when you start to think about, you know, some of

these big players that have been there forever, like Kraken, Bitstamp, etc. I mean, huge, you know, kind of in the US, at least, but still relatively kind of unheard of. And yeah, so I mean, if we do see kind of that growth, I'd expect crypto will definitely grow a lot more. But yeah, I mean, still a small piece of the puzzle. I would bet that number flips in three years, 66% crypto. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know.

I'm going to mark it down and do one of those remind me tweets now. And like, just to remind me that I said this, I'll do that for sure. Scott said my business will be two thirds crypto. What an idiot. I'll tell you like, yeah, what a fucking idiot. No, no. The price action. I mean, we, we definitely do you, like, yeah, what a fucking idiot. No, no. The price action, I mean, we definitely do see,

I do really want to kind of build an indicator for this, but crypto interest this fall is obviously skyrocketing, right? So on a relative basis, crypto is 30%. But in terms of like the recent boom, yeah i mean it's huge and uh really started in mid-october um i mean i think it had to do a lot with the election people kind of being very unsure you know uh what's going to happen and not not wanting to risk money elsewhere um and so just putting money to work in crypto just so that either they can, you know, ride it out or, um, or relatively speaking, you know, trade through it. Um, but, but a lot of that interest hasn't gone away. And,

um, so, I mean, I would assume that if price action continues at the rate we're currently trending at, um, you, you might be, you might be, uh, I guess, uh, surprised. Might be three months. It could literally be a couple months away. But yeah, so it really just depends on price action overall. I do think DeFi also helped a lot. I don't know. Helped and hurt, but yeah.

Helped hurt and helped again, maybe. I think, you know, obviously there was a bubble, but now it's rising from the ashes like a scam phoenix that it is. I mean, every tribe that I pull up from like the whole DeFi summer. It's just this giant lineup and giant lined up. Like it's so, you know, crypto is like one year in crypto is 10 years in any other market. And one year in DeFi is like the say it's like the say, so then like, you know, one year in crypto, it's like one month in DeFi. So I talk about that all the time, the life cycle

of a DeFi project, you know, an ICO used to at least take a couple of months before it would like be charting and trading on exchanges. People could have an idea for a food coin. It could be built 24 hours later, trading on a major exchange like Binance 48 hours later, up a hundred X and down back to zero in a week. That's the whole life cycle of an asset and the other market. So insane. Yeah. So let me ask you then, how do you deal with that sort of velocity? I mean, by the time you can add a chart, it might be a dead asset, right? So how do you deal with keeping up with something like DeFi? Yeah.

So, I mean, broadly speaking, we actually look to the biggest players in the exchange side of things to be the record for a lot of that. And so we kind of give it to them to kind of choose as to what they think. So a good example is FTX actually. We integrate data feeds from FTX. And so as a result, we integrate the feeds that FTX provides around DeFi. Likewise for Uniswap, we integrated Uniswap directly, but really only the top hundred coins because we really kind of have to be careful about you know like some of these things literally blow up within less than 24 hours right yeah full rug pull yeah i mean it's i mean when when literally rug pull like in the white paper

you gotta i mean you gotta you gotta be really careful as to what you're just need good timing get really rich you just gotta be need good timing. Get really rich. You just got to be there before AI. It's really crazy. And I assumed that FTX was going to be your example. I talked to Sam Begman-Fried recently on the podcast and we talked about that. He said like their real edge is that they're a tight team.

Their developers are committed and they can have something listed and trading with leverage within 20 you know, 20 minutes. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. And I, and I do appreciate the speed. It just, it really comes down to the choices that they're making. And, you know, we think really that, you know, since they're regulated, as is most of the exchanges you know, they probably have a better sense of what's, what's legit in their, in their,

you know, mindset. And for the most part, we try to work with companies that are regulated in the US specifically, because they have kind of the highest bar of kind of regulatory standards. So maybe we can't like, you know, offer all these crazy coins, but, but to be honest, we have some kind of sense of what's safe and leave the other 99% of it for whatever other platforms are trying to... I mean, coming from the equities world, I could tell you it mirrors exactly the low floats and kind of OTC products. Sure. It stocked with... We never listed any of that. The trading view, we don't list any of that because, you know, I mean, it's the exact same way that people blow themselves up.

It's just a different asset class and the speed for great names. So make for great names and very funny charts, but yes, I agree. So I know, I realized you guys just released at least a beta of a desktop app, which I have not tried yet, but I'm really excited about. Can you talk about that a little more? And what was the motivation for, you know, going from, I guess, browser based to desktop? Yeah. Well, it's a, it's a really kind of, it's an awesome upgrade that I'm excited for. And, you know, it's funny that it's gone full circle where back in the day, there were desktop products.

Then everything went to the web. We were the first ones to build HTML5 charts for the web. And now here we are going full circle back to the desktop. So the biggest thing that we've seen is people that really want the advanced use case of TradingView, which is multiple monitors, multiple screens use Safari, ultimately, you're going to wreck yourself or part of the web experience is going to start hanging. And ultimately, you'll hit limitations. And we realized that. if you will, that wants to have all these multiple monitors and screens, et cetera, you know, we can really take the training wheels off and like give you the, the, the whole, whole experience. And, um, it's in beta right now. So, um, you know, if you go to the blog, you can download the beta version, but it's obviously quite limited. Um, you know, it'll

start including a lot more features that you already see on the web. Um, but, uh, but yeah, it's, it's a big upgrade, you know, in terms of our the web. But yeah, it's a big upgrade. You know, in terms of our engineering team, you know, it's probably our most, what would you call that? Most aggressive high performance engineering team that's working on this. So to give you a sense of where it is

from a priority standpoint, it's a very, very high priority. And yeah, I mean, I love it so far. I mean, I've barely used kind of what it's, um, it's a very, very high priority. And, um, yeah, I mean, I love it so far. I mean, I've barely used kind of what it's capable of, but, um, I only have two monitors in my house. I don't know how many you've run yours, but, um, yeah, that's it. I just used to as a Mac and an ancillary screen. And honestly, most of the time it's like one screen is for trading and one is like email and twitter and all the other trash people bothering me

yeah i gotta ask how did you come about the whole dm thing like i think it's just it's so incredible because it's just the state of the industry that i mean that happens to you it happens to everybody it's so good that you just like turn it around on itself. That's an interesting question. So I don't think that there was so much thought behind it. I just thought that maybe it would be valuable as much as it's funny. It would be valuable to share sort of what kind of interaction people can tend to get privately, especially if you're doxed in this space, you know, and that there's some risk, but also, you know, I think that a lot of people in, in crypto are younger and probably

are extremely sensitive. Like any of us were in our twenties and they probably take those things to heart. So I thought that maybe it would be like helpful to just sort of make light of it. A, it would maybe disarm the trolling a bit because it becomes so almost like people now troll me, like, cause I think it's funny and know that it might get turned around on them. And B just to show people that like, it's not, it's not, yeah, it's not like a statement of your value as a human being because some idiot like is saying something negative. So it just sort of evolved from there. And I thought it was like a good content B, like I said, a good way to disarm the trolls and see just hopefully like a life lesson for people that

like none of this matters. Like none of that matters. It's not serious. These people don't know you, you know, and you kind of have to like grow up, I guess, and be an adult to take that position on it. But, um, and I honestly, now I just open my DMS and like, I die laughing. I turned it from like being for me, like the most horrible part of my day is, Oh, maybe I'll look at my DMS today. It's like 9,000 messages, sir, money, please. And now it's just like, I like go in there and just laugh at the things that people say to me. So, um, but yeah, and again, you know, that's, I think that's, uh, it's that social element, it's the community. And I think that it could, you know, if you can make something negative

into a positive, same thing you probably take with your business is just keep the positivity and the community growing and people will continue to interact. You know, we have a global moderation team now. I don't think people know, but, um, it's about, it's about 25 or so folks around the world. And they basically pick apart a lot of this stuff every day because community development is both positive and negative, right? It's not always people sharing great memes and life is all good. I mean, people go after each other and especially when there's like money on the line, right? It gets super personal. So it's very important that we, you know, keep vigilant on that because, yeah, trolls will just, you know, continue to troll. And so, yeah, I mean, we're

routinely banning people every day. And a lot of it is also limiting trading ideas that might be misleading or misrepresentative. How do you do that? What is the quality filter? Is it like a dude in a room? Yeah. So a lot of times you can reverse engineer channels or are promoting a specific type of company or a specific type of coin, as an example. And they inherently go into a conversation with that bias. And so our team looks at who the individual is, where do they actually come from, and then tries to figure out, is this person doing this for the right reasons, basically. And a lot of, you know, I mean,

as you can imagine, like these low float companies or low float stocks or low float equities or low float tokens or what have you, I mean, those are all kind of ripe for, you know, wrecking, you know, early investors who don't know what they're doing. So, so yeah, we do a lot of kind of analysis on that. But from purely like a trading standpoint, you know, we're pretty hands off as long as it's clear that, you know, you are sharing your bias, obviously saying that you are an investor or that, you know, you are positioned for this thing to, you know, be successful over a specific time range. We really try to have people take it seriously. And if they do, then go for it. Talk about whatever you want.

So you filter out bad intent, not shitty chart ideas. Just because you drew the worst pattern ever and your lines are all in the wrong places, that's on you, buddy. And up to someone else to recognize. Yeah, you're going to get trolled by the community more than by us. And that's just not good at sharing charts. So, yeah. So at what,

at what point do you become literally the only place that people come to talk about trading? Like when does Twitter become irrelevant because everybody's on trading view and chatting? I mean, that it's a really interesting one. You know, I, it's even working at Stockwoods for, for five years, we, we asked ourselves that question a lot too. Um, you know, I don't really know if there's like a switching point. I think that the thing is, is people really entrench in

a network and any successful social network has these, not just hooks, but, uh, they build moats and, um, Twitter's moat is the network that people have already built there, right? So not only do you follow, you know, Pomp and XYZ and all these other people, I mean, like, they also follow you. So that's naturally building that moat around what you've already built. So it really requires a kind of critical mass of people to actually invest in the product. And then, you know, that'll actually kick off a lot of different, you know, nuanced conversations, but we, we really don't, I guess, you know, condone one the other. I mean, we know that we're really good at technology.

The fact that social is a part of that is for some people and not for others. And, and that's perfectly fine. I think that, you know, we've thought a lot about actually integrating Twitter or integrating Discord or integrating Telegram because we know full well that, you know, everybody on there is also in a, you know, tough. It's amazing to me how many people have Telegram channels. Like, it's literally mind-blowing. I have no idea how they evolve so fast but um

yeah and it's such a suboptimal platform for what they're using it for like yes i want to sign into telegram and see 9 000 missed messages and then go try to see so yeah it's amazing to me as well because it's sort of like it's really not a real experience yeah yeah so we've thought about a lot like do we want to build the only experience or do we want to kind of be the open framework where you can build in your own experiences um and so we're very much working through that but um i mean in terms of you know people sharing charts i mean people share our charts across every network and um pretty much any telegram channel um that i'm in uh you know there ends up being trading charts in there oh yeah i've never seen a chart that's not trading

you unless it's a at this point like i used to see coinage is that what it was called i don't even know but i used to see their charts in like 2017 i've never seen a chart that's not trading you unless it's just an asset that's not on TradingView and it's one of those garbage TradingView copy platforms like chartrx.gov.org crap, whatever, you have to, but otherwise it's all TradingView. Yeah, yeah. There's nobody else.

And, you know, I mean, we're also integrating our charts to every other site too. So I don't know if you ever use like a Binance or a Bitpanda or anything. Yeah. It's your charts. They're also our charts. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. So then before we, I know we're here, but, uh, well, what are the next, you know, uh, five years look like at TradingView? I know the desktop is a huge push,

but what's the biggest thing that we're going to see? Am I going to like think of a chart and it's going to send my order off and I'm going to stop out before I've even decided, know that I thought of it. Plug it into your neck. Yeah, let's go, man.

Upload it and then download it. I mean, broadly speaking, we're constantly, you know what I think of TradingView really is a rough cut gem. And I don't know if you saw the movie, but it's also. Oh my God, that movie, I'm still stressed. Still stressed literally the entire time. But I think of TradingView as a rough cut gem. I mean, like they have really good technology, they have really good DNA, you have a really good culture. And, and broadly speaking, you know, the best

thing that we can do is just amplify that. So I don't even really think we have to reinvent the wheel. It's just about scaling that to the nth degree. You know, there's a lot that we could do for the data world. And, you know, I've been in the kind of fintech space, specifically in trading tech for almost eight years now, I can tell you that the number of monopolies there are in the data worlds that basically restrict access to data, make it impossible to get, you know, it's like a constant battle. And I think that the best thing that we can do is break down those barriers, so that people can get access to as much data as possible and for as least as possible. So we have some big stuff coming in the first quarter around that.

But I really do think that any kind of data you can imagine, chances are we'll probably chart it at some point in time. And so anything that people have, like from a request standpoint, obviously reach out to us because we're probably chart it at some point in time and uh and so anything that people have like from a request standpoint obviously reach out to us because we're constantly adding it we have a whole look at your coronavirus charts at one point yeah yeah exactly and we thought about okay well we could do coronavirus we might as well do like let's do spanish flu like i don't know we could literally chart all these things if we wanted to um yeah so that's a big goal i think is just, again, democratization of as much data as possible.

And then beyond that, I mean, you know, we're doing more than just charts. And I think that's a big thing to keep in mind is that, you know, if you really invest in the platform, you'll realize, like, our screener tools are getting pretty intense. We have another completely new tool that'll be launching in Q1 as well. It's just a different way to visualize data by asset class and type.

But yeah, so I think it's, again, it's like the kernel is there. Now it's just kind of like growing around that in a bigger way. Yeah, but then, you know, I mean, obviously we're an open book, so we're always interested in feedback. And so, yeah, folks like yourself are... you know, I mean, obviously we're, we're an open book, so we're always interested in feedback. Um, and, uh, so yeah, folks like yourself or I bother your team all the time. Free ideas. Send them over Scott's get them over. Yeah. I don't think they like me, but I bother them all the time. Um, yeah, that's awesome to hear. So where can people,

I keep up with you after this follow you and follow you guys progress. Um, I mean, follow trading view anywhere, you know, myself, I actually have, uh, my original Twitter handle is from when I was in college. I just never changed it, but it's, it's Crosby Venture. And, uh, I actually thought about like, Oh, I'll start a venture firm someday, but you know, I left it because maybe I will someday. Um, so people can follow me, uh, Twitter, Facebook, whatever. Um, but yeah, I mean, tune into TradingView. I mean, you know, we just launched live streams, so people are watching those all day and, um, yeah, I mean, it's enough people to follow us. Well, I love what you guys are doing. You're the most, arguably the most fundamental platform that I use on a daily basis. I mean, I probably,

I would, I don't even know how to look, but I bet I have 3000 charts saved. That's awesome. That's so cool. Yeah. Easily. I have to, because I chart things for like, you know, newsletter subscribers and people on Twitter all the time. I mean, I've charted probably half the stuff on my platform. It's incredible. So I love it. It's the first thing I check, you know, when I sit down at my desk and the last thing I check before I shut down. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what you guys have coming in the future. And I love this chat. So we're going to do this again. So I want to cross 50% crypto attrition so that I can say that I was right, or it'll be 66% for me to be right. So we can schedule ahead of time. All right, man. Well, thank you so much for your

time and have a good one.