[rachelita]

Hey everyone! I’m co-founder and CEO of Trigger Finance, which I’m thrilled to share with you today :)

Trigger is simplifying the world of stock investing by reducing everything to an “IF THIS, THEN THAT” statement, called a ‘trigger’. You can create triggers to track all sorts of things happening in the market -- for example, if a stock drops suddenly, or if Apple announces earnings at a certain level, or if the Fed is raising interest rates. You can use Trigger to be notified (in real-time) when important events affecting your portfolio occur, and in the future, can execute automated trades through our platform.

We currently integrate with 8 different brokerages (including eTrade, Fidelity, and TDAmeritrade) for account read-access. We hope to expand this list in the future (looking at you, Robinhood!).

Our mission is to help the individual investor take a more disciplined, rules-based approach to managing their portfolio. Please help us deliver on that promise by giving us your feedback!

Please let us know if you have any questions - we’re here to answer them, Rachel

[lewisl9029]

I really like the idea of the app. Unfortunately, the "Get Trigger on your phone" link takes you to the App Store, and my phone runs Android. I suspect an Android client is in the works? How about a web client too?

In the mean time, I'd recommend interested non-iOS users to check out Quantopian [1], which is not nearly as simple and accessible, but gives you the power to do real algorithmic trading.

[1] https://www.quantopian.com/

[Larrikin]

That's too bad, but glad I read the comments. It's becoming pretty rare to see a product "launch" without having an app for both sides

[rachelita]

Quantopian is awesome! We plan to release an API this summer for those who want to play with triggers and their brokerage accounts programmatically. Thanks!

[maneesh]

Hi there! I'm the founder of Pavlok, a wearable haptic device for changing behavior. We are on IFTTT, and are able to vibrate, beep, and release patterns of electric stimuli.

I had built a chrome extension integration for vibration / beeps / zaps at variable stock prices, and it was quite useful for a few traders I knew.

I am really interested in knowing more about your API, do you have any more info? Also, will you be on Android -- and do you need to have the app installed to use your IFTTT channel?

Thanks!

[e-mail] http://pavlok.com/ifttt

[pavel_lishin]

> release patterns of electric stimuli.

Is that a nice way of saying that you can program it to zap you?

[maneesh]

yes you can program to zap you! Useful for reducing social media usage (i use it on reddit), and staying more productive (integrated with RescueTime).

[Netcob]

My first thought was that once trigger has enough users, some people might pay to get access to the rule database. That way you could predict what trigger is going to do under certain circumstances, or maybe what needs to happen for certain outcomes.

[incongruity]

That's an interesting question because, IMHO, by formalizing my rules and externalizing them, I'm sharing critically important strategy information. If ever I'm protective of my data, this would rank highly, I think. EVEN if anonymized or aggregated.

[balls187]

What is the latency of your data feed?

How do you mitigate the latency between the stock exchanges, and the user's location + latency introduce via mobile devices?

Thanks!

[rachelita]

Hello! Co-founder here. Thanks for the kind words!

Bummer that you're noticing bugs though. If you feel up to it, we'd love to hear what they are - you can email [e-mail] or live-chat with us through the app (press the logo on your icon).

We'd love to integrate Robinhood in the future but have nothing that we can announce right now, unfortunately. Sent at 5:23 PM on Thursday Adrian: Hello! Co-founder here.

We currently access a Nasdaq last sale feed through a distributor (Xignite) for our real-time feed. We make no guarantees around latency per se, though in reality it ends up being on the order of < 1 minute (at worst) from exchange to a trigger being evaluated on our backend, and a bit more than that (highly dependent on many other factors) to being displayed on a user's phone.

Hope that this helps though I realize I wasn't very specific!

[balls187]

> Hope that this helps though I realize I wasn't very specific!

It does, thank you.

The idea and execution thereof seems very slick, but I can't help shake how much of a disadvantage regular stock traders are when put up against all the ultra-high speed trading done by algorithms.

Wall-street Rant Aside, from my previous life building an algorithm based hedgefund, one option would be to put your trigger-execution engine as close to the stock-exchanges as possible, to reduce the latency between market events surfaced in your feed & trigger execution. Softreal time actions, such as any User interactions with the mobile app being persisted to backends, could be done at cloud/dc's, then propagated to your backend in NYC. You could provide a simple SLA saying that trigger updates will have 1-minute lag time for effect, but actual Event->Trigger->Execution would be completely based on the time to evaluate the trigger.

[tedmiston]

I do not get the vibe that their vision is to democratize HFT.

[balls187]

Agreed. My point was that, while a trigger based system eases the use, ultimately we're all at a disadvantage because computers.

[wocram]

What is the bulk of the 1 minute delay? While I would hardly call that real-time, it shouldn't matter for most reasonable usages.

[mistermann]

2 questions:

a) Is the REAL real-time, or is it delayed? (If not delayed, who's allowing you to share real-time data for free?)

b) Can I administer 100% of my configuration on the web and then just use my phone to monitor it?

[rachelita]

hey thanks for your question! a) this is real time data (not free!) provided by Nasdaq's consolidated feed. b) At the moment, we are mobile first however we plan to offer an API where you can set your triggers programmatically if you are so inclined, and monitor them on your phone.

[Analemma_]

I'm not terribly well-versed in stocks and trading, so forgive me if this is an obvious question, but:

My broker (Fidelity) charges me something like $7/day/stock to keep a stop order open. Presumably I could accomplish the same thing for free with Trigger. Is there some major difference between a "sell if below X" Trigger and a stop order, or is Fidelity just bilking me?

[koolba]

Per day? That's a new one. Every brokerage I've ever used has fixed commissions for a trade, regardless of how long it takes to execute. The only edge case is a partial fill on a good till cancel limit order that causes the execution to spam multiple days. I think that might lead to multiple commissions but it's fairly u likely.

In no instance have I seen a fee for maintaining an open order. If anything they should pay you! You're essentially giving them a free option!

[rachelita]

Yes, all conditions orders, like limit and stop loss etc at the end of day are triggers. Right now you can set a level for a trigger an issue a market order (which is a SL) or a limit order (stop limit order) with your existing brokerage for just the commission they would charge you. In the future, you can construct your own sophisticated stop loss orders, like IF GOOG trades below $500 AND it's outside of 1 hour of the close, THEN sell.

[hellcow]

For what it's worth, Robinhood allows free stop orders without any time limit.

[Analemma_]

Interesting, I guess I just need a new broker. Amusingly, after I finished my comment I figured I'd log into my Fidelity account (which I hadn't done in a while), and I couldn't because it turns out they don't allow certain characters in their passwords and so the last time I changed my password it silently failed without telling me.

Still, Trigger sounds pretty neat even if you do have a non-crappy broker. As soon as HN picks it apart to make sure there are no obvious pitfalls, I'll definitely take a look.

[tedmiston]

There's a huge obvious pitfall with Trigger: information arrives several orders of magnitude too late vs. HFT. Investing in a style that mimics them but at hundreds (maybe thousands) of times slower is inherently flawed.

And if it helps inform your broker research, Robinhood is the exception to the rule when it comes to commission-free trades.

[jxm262]

Cool app! my SO was asking me for something very simple to use, will ask her to give this a try. Is it required to be linked to an actual broker, or can you get limited messages from some other public data feed? For example, get alerts on price movements

Also, side note she uses Robinhood, not sure if there's plans to add that at some point

[rachelita]

Absolutely, you don't need to have a brokerage account to use Trigger. You can just set alerts to get notifications on events and price movements you care about, but also track the performance of how you would have done if you sold or bought a stock at that time.

Re-robinhood, we are in line to get access to their API, and it will be the next broker we chose to integrate with. You can potentially have free algorithmic trading from your phone!

[xixi77]

This is neat, once IB is in I might try it :)

How are you planning to handle the user data though (who set what trigger when, etc.?) -- will you be selling it (even if anonymized) to third parties?

[rachelita]

Cool! IB has an extensive API and they would be next on the list (hopefully Robinhood as well). At first it would not be automatic trading, but rather pull up an order form when the trigger fires. You can chose to set a market or limit order after the condition is met. Regarding selling the data, we have no plans to do sell it to third parties. If anything, we would like to offer insights back to the community of what we are seeing from the triggers, important levels and sell/buy interest.

[Immortalin]

Do you think you can open source the broker integration code? Currently there's a dearth of such libraries

[rachelita]

Check out trading ticket's API here https://www.trade.it/ they've done a great job at combining brokerage integrations.

[philippnagel]

Super cool! What's your monetization strategy (e.g. money gets you more triggers)?

[rachelita]

We plan to offer a premium subscription to unlock premium triggers (like compound ones, if this AND that AND that) and also premium data types (like cryptocurrencies). In addition, we plan to offer an API that we can license to both developers and financial technologies businesses.

[aditya]

Awesome app! Great work, Rachel and congrats on launching. You guys rock!

[tmaly]

do you have integration with IB ?

[rachelita]

not yet, Robinhood and IB are next up on the list for us!