AMA – I'll be answering questions starting from August 25th at 6pm PDT to 11pm PDT. If questions are still coming when we hit the end, I'll keep going.
Ask me anything – the build, the legal side, the money, the failures, day trading in general.
Hello everyone, I'm c0tt0nc4ndyta, a Day Trader who has spent a decade teaching Day Trading for free on my YouTube channel. I've spent the last 5 years creating a new type of Day Trading experience. My journey started in 2021 with some Twitch streams where I went and hosted esports like tournaments. My community loved it and it fueled me to develop the world's first Gamified Day Trading experience. 5 years later with the help of my team (15 devs + me the CEO) and we finally were able to release Chart Raiders this week.
I'm not someone who was born rich, I refused all investors because it would bloat the expectations and ultimately force us to increase fees on the platform, and I always wanted this project to be by the people for the people. For the last 5 years I've navigated an insane amount of curveballs and challenges, everything from making this platform operate ethically, to working with my lawyer for 3 years understanding and implementing framework to operate legally, and dealing with failure after failure from the dev side as we created something really unique as a world first product and here we are. An extremely passionate community of people who supported my dream to make the world's first gamified Day Trading game.
The problem we solved
Day Trading is currently a "negative sum game", which is known as:
Day trading is structurally negative-sum because transaction costs, fees, and spreads siphon money out of the collective pool before any profits are distributed to individual traders.
We want to dismantle this predatory practice and create an environment where people fund each-other instead of the corporations fueling the next way they want to capitalize on the Day Trading space. Whether it's charting platforms introducing endless pay walls with useless indicators, or prop firms flooding the industry with rules only designed to help them make more money. We took an approach that has honest profits, and allows people to make more money for their time, without the fees.
The idea is simple
A software where you (or you and your friends if you want to play with teammates) are put into matches that we host where your winnings are based on how you traded inside of a match vs other players instead of vs the markets.
A simple example of this is you pay an entry fee of $10, $100, or $1000 and each other player does the same thing to compete for the prize pool. We distribute 100% of the prize pool back to players. The only thing we charge is a single hosting fee per match, and there are no per trade fees at all. Take 2 trades or take 200 trades inside that match, it costs you nothing extra. A $10 ticket has a $1 hosting fee, a $100 ticket has a $5 fee, and a $1000 ticket has a $30 fee, and that is the entire cost of playing. At the end of each match the person who performs the best takes the biggest chunk of the prize pool.
We operate where top 60% of players get paid, and first place would take 33%. If you are using a $10 ticket and there's 100 players, if you finish first you get $330 after a 30 minute match.
Your rank in the match is how you placed vs other players, not how well you did overall. For example: every player starts with the same $100 balance and if you lost 80% of your bankroll in that match and everyone else lost 81% or more you'd still take home first place.
The idea is that we want people being ranked and earning based on how they do against other players, not against the market. The market is convoluted in many ways, and in our opinion this way of operating should have always been the case. People fund the markets so people should be rewarded based on how they do vs other people who also fund the markets. Cut the corps and their fees out.
A few screen shots of our in match gameplay.
Chart Raiders – the trading UI
Chart Raiders – placing an order mid-match
Ways in which we gamified Day Trading
We introduced a few simple elements that really help bring Day Trading out of the stone ages. A few of the main features we have are:
Trade Delay – Activate this 7 second timer and it allows you to cancel the trade after entering it allowing users to reverse a trade as if it never happened, it's a limited resource but can help you in a match avoid a bad trade by reversing it. You get 7 seconds of this per match as it's a limited resource.
One of the resources/gamified elements available is Trade Delay.
Chart Raiders – Trade Delay counting down
Peek Meter – 20 Seconds of seeing the top 3 players trades and where they have placed them at any time during a match. Since this is a pvp game knowing how to have an edge over the top players becomes a valuable thing. Again a limited resource where you can use it in burst of 5 seconds or whatever you choose, or burn all 20 seconds at once. Take a peek at other players trades in clutch moments.
Trade Elixir – Our version of a health potion, get one per match to refill 5-10% of your balance, or a teammate's, once per match.
Equipment – Tailor your trading style to exchange resources based on your equipped items. More of a Trade Delay player and hate using Peek Meter? No problem simply swap your resources by changing your gear to customize the way you like to Day Trade and play matches.
Team Matches – Play solo or with a friend for 2 player team matches, or even with 3 others for 4 total in a squad match.
Navigating through our menus.
Chart Raiders – the master menu
The Skill Tree (this part is completely free)
One of the things that mattered most to me was that nobody should have to pay to learn how to do this. So we built a full Technical Analysis course directly into the platform. 50+ lessons covering everything from Hold Levels to Logic Flow to Mental Analysis, and it doesn't cost anything to go through them.
Most lessons run about 4 or 5 minutes so you can actually fit them around a real life. You can see which lessons your friends have finished and where they are compared to you, which turned out to be a much bigger motivator than we expected. We also built an AI mentor into it called Commander that you can ask questions as you work through the tree, so when you get stuck on a concept you're not just sitting there guessing or digging through 40 minutes of a YouTube video to find the one part you needed.
I've spent a decade teaching this stuff for free and I wasn't about to start charging for it now.
Our skill tree content has been developed for over a decade solely by c0tt0nc4ndyta.
Chart Raiders – the Skill Tree with 50+ free lessons
Story Mode
This one is going to sound strange for a trading platform but stick with me.
We've been writing a novel for years and it's built into the software. It's set in 2047 in a world we created called Robopunk, where freedom of thought has been taken away, and Day Trading is one of the last ways the underground fights back against the corporations that took it.
It's a multi book series. Book 01 is in the platform now, 3 chapters and 49 pages, and you can either read it or listen to the full audio narration if you'd rather have it going while you do something else. There's a gallery and a soundtrack that go with it.
I know most people who show up are here to trade and will never touch this, and that's fine. But the world we built means something to me and it's the reason the whole platform looks and feels the way it does instead of looking like every other trading terminal.
This is our Story Mode, it's a multi book novel we have been writing for years. The place is Remoat City, and freedom of thought is being taken.
Chart Raiders – Story Mode, Book 1
Our engine
We have spent years creating the first real candlestick engine. Built as an SDK we are in the final stages of developing our Candlestick engine which does everything from having rich on screen animations, to 120fps no tick candles, candlestick emotions based on price, and so much more. We did this as we are firm believers in E-sports as a future for Day Trading.
You can take a look at it on my most recent streams on Twitch or Youtube if you're interested in seeing the engine in action.
Payments
Our payment system is purely smart contract escrowed. We developed blockchain as legal escrow in smart contracts on web3. No bank fees, fully transparent, and we never come in contact with your winnings or funds at any point. It goes from your wallet into a publicly viewable smart contract, and at the end of the match it's redistributed from that same contract to the winning players. Simple, easy, transparent, and almost 0 fees (we absorb the gas fee).
I have put my entire life into this project, and self funded it by grinding 7 days a week for the past 5 years straight. I don't have endless pockets to do paid marketing, I am not trying to compete with exchanges, I'm simply someone who hated most things about this industry but absolutely loves Day Trading, and wanted to create a product that could help save the industry.
There's so much more I could go over but I also don't want to treat this as a marketing post. I'm wanting to share my journey, what I created to help the Day Trading world, and I'm trying to spread awareness as someone who has spent 5 years in their basement with a team of 15 people I paid for out of pocket to create something unique and cool. I'm a Day Trader, and I hope you will all see me as such and not a meaningless plug for my company.
It's called Chart Raiders, https://www.chartraiders.com/ look us up if you're interested!
Now Ask me anything. Some things people usually want to know:
- How did you make a paid trading platform legal?
- What stops someone from gambling their whole balance in one trade?
- Why turn down investors when you're personally paying salaries?
- Why did you build a candlestick engine from scratch instead of licensing one?
- Biggest regret in the 5 years of dev?
Thanks so much for your ears, eyes, and brain cells. Much love and cheers!
AMA: I'm a day trader who spent 5 years and my life savings building a gamified day trading platform
byu/ChartRaiders inoptions
Posted by ChartRaiders
1 Comment
How much of this post did you write vs the LLM?