Success leaves clues. Finance Strategists sat down with Stefano Treviso, founder of TheTradingBible.com. He shared his thoughts on the past, present, and future of the company, as well as the insight he gained from running the business. Q: Who are you and what’s your background? I was born and raised in Venezuela in a family that has its origins in Greece and Italy. Growing up in this beautiful yet troubled country gave me unique perspectives on life as from a very early age I was interested in building businesses. After many hits and misses due to the difficult hyperinflation that Venezuela experienced (and still does), I decided to leave my country in search for a better life with more opportunities. Armed with a bag and 400€ in cash I boarded a plane to Italy where a relative offered to host me for 3 months to start my life. Shortly thereafter (precisely 8 days), my own cousin threw me in the street when she realised I was poor and useless to them. I ended up sleeping at the beach in the restaurant of an old friend of my italian grandmother that offered to give me a small 4x2 metre storage room. The heat was unbearable, 50 degrees celsius, so I simply used the room as storage and slept on the beach. Three months of my life passed like this, but I somehow managed to make a business taking photos of tourists and selling them in the afternoon using a small Canon printer. It was beautiful. I made the best out of it. After gathering a little bit more money, I made my way to Barcelona to an old high school friend’s house who offered to help me out. While waiting for my special foreigner ID, I started playing poker in Casino Barcelona to make a living. It went well until one night I went above my league and got destroyed by professionals. Luckily, I just received my long awaited document and started searching for a job. That’s when I landed my first offer in a call centre that specialised in Forex trading. The reason I was able to convince the owner of that company to hire me was because I was very passionate about trading since I was 15 and read a lot of books about it and played with many demo accounts. From that point on, I started to grow within the industry. Shortly after leaving this company due to personal differences, I relocated to Cyprus where hundreds of brokerage firms are headquartered. I climbed my way to the top by always giving my best, learning new skills in my spare time, and making myself more valuable each day. From a guy sleeping on a beach to becoming a Digital Marketing Manager, Head of Sales or Chief Marketing Officer while founding my own business over the course of the last 3 years. Q: Who has been your biggest influence, and why did they have such a significant effect on you? My grandfather, Antonio Phorlakis, arrived in Venezuela at a young age. He was completely broke but managed to become successful and build quite a name for himself. This definitely brings a connection between us as I’m also on the same path after arriving completely broke in Italy. Sadly, none of his success or wealth passed on to me due to certain circumstances, yet I believe this is what made me stronger and able to pull through any situation in life. Q: Knowing what you know now, what advice would you have given your younger self? My best advice would be: Never start smoking, it just hurts your health and burns your pocket. Take care of your health above anything, exercise every day. Do as many online courses as possible and always learn new things. Just like different mafias or gangs have entry rules and rituals, you should also have a code to decide which people you let in your life or not. Surround yourself with the best influences possible and always be cautious to not let people in easily. Q: What is TheTradingBible.com? TheTradingBible.com is an educational website that aims to simplify and demystify trading through a fun and friendly approach by making easy to read content along with hand-drawn illustrations. Everyone wants to learn about finances but the information out there is either too complicated, outdated, impractical, or made up by scammers trying to sell you something. There are almost no resources where the information is easy, friendly, and fun at the same time for this topic. That’s where TheTradingBible.com decided to step in and make all of this better. Q: What makes TheTradingBible.com different from its competitors? The most important part? Ethics. The financial industry is full of misinformation, dream sellers, and affiliate marketers who have very little conscience and don’t mind referring people to brokers that will scam them, to highly priced educational programs that deliver no value, or to many other services that are just meant to take an innocent person’s money. At TheTradingBible.com, we carefully choose who we partner with when it comes to brokers or financial services in order to prevent any wrongdoers from reaching our audience. The second most important part? Simplicity. Currently, there are many websites providing broker comparisons, reviews, rankings, educational content, and courses. The main issue is that only a small percentage of them have quality information and out of that small percentage only one or two provide beginner-friendly content. To make things even harder, they only provide the content in one specific area such as Forex or stocks. As the name says, TheTradingBible.com is meant to be literally the go-to place for people looking to learn about trading regardless of the complexity of any topic or their experience level and in all possible categories. Q: What led you to start TheTradingBible.com? Finding out about the scams being operated for the last 30 years by a lot of unregulated brokers and in some cases some regulated ones. A lot of brokers employ “account managers” whose only job is actually to mislead the customer into losing as much money as possible. When I found out that this is going on, I decided to take my own stand and try to build an ethical and profitable business at the same time. Our mission is to educate people to the best of our abilities and point them towards good financial services while we also enlighten them in how scams work to prevent them from falling for them. Q: What has the experience of building the business taught you? So much! Actually, imagine me starting this business and wanting to build everything from scratch by myself and with no funding, it was crazy! After gathering all the information and research and hand-drawing more than 400 slides to build our low-cost trading course, I ventured into building the website. At that precise time I made the decision I wanted to learn how to code in several languages to build my website from scratch as I really didn’t want to use Wordpress. It took me 8 months of non-stop all night learning to become moderately skilled in HTML, CSS, JS and PHP. At the same time I was writing financial content and managed to develop our web application (front-end and back-end). And this was just on the technical side! On the business side of things, I dealt during this year with learning how to craft a good business plan and how to develop a killer SEO strategy to compete against gigantic websites with teams of 50 writers. My best recommendation to anyone looking to start any business is definitely to create a business plan. It will help you see your own business from different perspectives and this will completely change your future strategy. Q: Where do you see things headed for you and the company in the next 5 years? I see TheTradingBible.com making a name for itself as a brand of trust, ethics, and simplicity. We want to be the go-to solution for financial news, education, and brokerage comparisons. Every time someone reads one of our articles, it’s an opportunity to save themselves quite a lot of trouble and actually enjoy the beauty behind the financial markets. When it comes to myself, I’m a person with many passions. I love trading, cryptocurrencies, filmmaking, motorcycle riding, travelling, coding, playing piano, etc. I don’t want to be constrained to a single thing. I believe there are stages in life and right now it’s my stage to build this business, make it as large as possible (hopefully so large that no one can alter its ethical course of action in the future), and prepare myself for a profitable exit once the key milestones have been achieved. My true goal in life is to always maintain myself with a larger purpose. I want to use my skills for good. To bring innovation, to help people be better. I realised long ago that in life, destinations don’t matter but rather the journey. I want to make sure that the journey always makes sense for a greater good and you can only do that by staying hungry, driven, humble, and surrounded by like-minded people working on cool projects. Good luck. For more information, visit TheTradingBible.com .
Introduction
Who is Stefano Treviso?
Business
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.
