In the long, long, ago, in the before time, I would read the paper to research stocks and put buy and sell orders in to my stock broker, who also put in his two-cents of what I should buy and sell (he was rarely right) and he took a nice big commission for the privilege of it.
In the late 90’s when the dot com stock bubble was going on, I transitioned to online trading through Datek (which TechCrunch lists as a precocious company in a schizophrenic industry), which was one of the few and early online trading companies. These were heady times for me, making and losing thousands of dollars in minutes, fortunately I made more than I lost, but this platform and idea changed the landscape of stock trading from being an exclusive club to something that anyone could easily do from home on their computer.
Now here we are in 2014, but last year tradeMONSTER released their new HTML5 based trading platform that has radically changed the game for stock, options and futures traders. I was more interested in the technology used and the process to get there than in stock trading per se, as HTML5 has been the Shangri La for developers trying to make cross platform apps without having to resort to particular platform toolkits. It was with that in mind that I spoke with Sanjib Sahoo, CTO of tradeMONSTER:
Shawn Gordon:
Sanjib, first off, amazing job with the app, it is just gorgeous on all levels, the look, the responsiveness, the tech behind it; truly an impressive accomplishment.
Sanjib Sahoo:
Thank you, we’re very proud of what we put together, the market and industry seem to agree as well.
SG:
Speaking of the market, can you tell me a bit about the acceptance of it so far?
SS:
Since we launched last year there have been more than four million shares traded in the platform and over 350,000 user logins.
Can you give me a little history of where tradeMONSTER started at and where you are now before we jump in to the guts of the app? SS:
Sure. tradeMONSTER went from a startup in 2008 to the #2 online trading company in just five years. Our new platform was built in just nine months with a small internal team of 10 people that was augmented with about 10 outside contractors. Using an Agile methodology, we first scoped out the entire project, then broke it down in to four-to-five week Sprints. We tackled what we perceived as the most complex aspects first to make sure they were achievable, if we went down a path that wasn’t working, the short sprints allowed us to change course without too much investment in a particular methodology.
At the end of the day, we had to take what our web platform was doing and make that functional, responsive and easily usable across multiple devices and form factors, all while keeping a unified code base.SG:
So, to be clear, this is a pure HTML5 play, taking advantage of all the promises that came with it? Surely it wasn’t as simple as we all dreamed. What were some of the challenges you ran in to?
SS:
Certainly there were challenges, probably the biggest related to Android fragmentation and more specifically with scrolling, animations, memory footprints, event handling and handling multiple http requests. That said, we were able to do
99 percent of it in pure HTML5,
then we have optimizations in the native layer. We spent a lot of our time coming up with optimizations, to reduce the load on the device as much as possible and keep the bandwidth usage as low as possible. For example, some devices have more horsepower than others. On a more powerful device, we’ll do the calculations on the device to take advantage of offloading some of that processing, but on a lower power device, we’ll do it on our servers before we push it to the client.
SG:
Has the support of HTML5 on the various platforms gotten better since your initial release?
SS:
Oh yes, significantly. We recently released a real time market analysis tool for example. It goes through the entire universe of the market essentially, in less than a second and streams it to your phone. That is over eight billion data points over six trading hours a day.
SG:
You’ve filed for patents with regard to some of the technology that was built through this process. Is there anything you can speak to specifically or if it might be released to in the wild?
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