Success leaves clues. Finance Strategists sat down with the head of U.S. Operations at TradingView, Pierce Crosby. He shared a bit of his personal background and some of his thoughts on what elevates TradingView above other technical analysis platforms. Q: Who are you and what’s your background? I’m from Northern California, and my hometown had 330 people in it. I know that because the sign on the way into town said as much. Small town vibe. Barely got through high school, but landed at the University of California, Santa Cruz (“go slugs”) in 2007 during the financial crisis. Realizing the outcome of my college career would likely dictate my employability, I took a pretty sharp turn to become an all-star in Politics, Journalism, and Economics. After building the campus’ first television program, I went on to Columbia’s Journalism School for a Master's and a quick shot of New York. I worked as a consultant for a couple of years, a reporter at Reuters Breakingviews, and eventually broke into the startup world in late 2013. Q: What is TradingView? High level? TradingView is your homepage for finance. We’ve got just about every asset, dataset, tool, visualization, community, and trading capability you could want. Basically, we are on a mission to make financial markets accessible to the masses. Unlike some, we don’t take a side and condone trading certain assets, markets, etc, we simply provide the platform for individuals to do their research, analysis, and come to a comfortable conclusion about what to do with their money. The background of the founders is too long to get into here, but they are notorious for their approach to building extremely advanced technology—they’ve been working on trading technology for over 20 years together. When you bring that together with the skills and media expertise my colleagues and I bring to the table, it’s a winning combination for building an amazing product. Q: What makes TradingView different than other technical analysis platforms? The scale and complexity of what you can do on top of TradingView are pretty limitless. There have been very few cases where we run across platforms that actually do something novel from what we do. I mean, you can have 8 different Y-Scales on a chart, you can code your own indicators, oscillators, share them with your friends, and do all of this… for free? I think there are some premium products out there like Bloomberg or FactSet who might have a bigger bench of tools available to end customers, but let’s be clear—they’re $1,000+ per month to use these things. Our highest tier subscription for folks who want to take the training wheels off is less than $100/month, so we compete heavily on price too. Q: What successes have you and your team had at TradingView? It’s tough to be celebrating our successes during such a dark time in the world. But I can say that we are heads-down, focused on continually improving what we do so that we can better serve the customers we have and keep expanding to new audiences. We’ve recently hired our 250th employee at the company, and we just broke the 200th largest website in the world. Those are big wins for us on a corporate and business level. I would also mention our streaming product because we think it’s going to actually be a substantial shift in how people consume market commentary. Right now, the industry standard is to get “takes” from top influencers on CNBC or Twitter. Most of them aren’t actually market participants or really care about what traders and investors are going through. So we created TradingView Streams to hand the keys BACK to the investor community on TradingView, and have them share their own research and trades in a real-time format. So far, over 500 traders and investors have streamed, and more than 300,000 people have tuned in. This is just the beginning, but it’s super exciting to see growth like this in such a short period of time. Q: Where do you see things headed for TradingView in the next 5 years? Strategically, we want to be providing something for everyone. It’s well known internally, but TradingView can often be “too hardcore”. If you always optimize for your power users, you lose sight of the bigger picture. People need information, and we can solve that in a much better way, so it's a big part of our roadmap. We’re ramping up our operations in Asia and continue to expand here in New York and Europe. We’re globally distributed, so there’s usually someone from TradingView in any country you visit—and it’s safe to say the expansion will continue. We think there’s a big opportunity in connecting more platforms to what we do as well. Some of that you can see with our recent brokerage and exchange relationships, but there is a lot more to come this summer and fall, that’s the best I can say. For more information, see tradingview.com.
Introduction
Who is Pierce Crosby?
What is TradingView?
True Tamplin is a published author, public speaker, CEO of UpDigital, and founder of Finance Strategists.
True is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance (CEPF®), author of The Handy Financial Ratios Guide, a member of the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, contributes to his financial education site, Finance Strategists, and has spoken to various financial communities such as the CFA Institute, as well as university students like his Alma mater, Biola University, where he received a bachelor of science in business and data analytics.
To learn more about True, visit his personal website or view his author profiles on Amazon, Nasdaq and Forbes.
