FinTech Tracker: Test Your Stock Market Mettle With Traders Cockpit 

Trading in the markets is no easy task. From reading the markets, to picking the right time to enter and exit stocks, takes skill that everyone may not have.

Traders Cockpit says it can help through its proprietary algorithm engine, which enables people to put in a basic set of rules, a list of securities and trade. The engine tracks the portfolio continuously and generates alerts ranging from buy or sell to hold on a particular security.

The company, started by Gumption Labs, caters to active traders who want to deal in large volumes across different securities but don't have the ability to design their own algorithms. Co-founders Anurag Saboo and Amit Sharda, both engineers and management graduates, say the idea came from personal experience.

Saboo told BloombergQuint that he used to trade actively in stocks and found it difficult to configure trades and write software to monitor and execute these trades. From there emerged the idea of Traders Cockpit, which is a cloud based financial markets data analytics company.

“The product is built for anyone who has a knowledge of the markets and doesn't want to code everything,” Saboo said.

Since 2012, the company has developed an array of offerings ranging from stock trackers to robotic portfolio managers and strategy testing engines. Together, these tools give traders the option to screen and track the markets. For those who want alerts, Traders Cockpit has a premium subscription based model which costs about Rs 2000 per month and provides real time alerts on phone, web and email.

The company has more than 75,000 registered users who use this platform but only 10 percent of them are paying customers. Saboo said the idea is to expand the base of paying users.

Traders Cockpit has also tied up with Mumbai based Stockholding Corporation of India Ltd, which has 200 offices across India and serves lakhs of traders. As part of the deal, traders aligned with Stockholding Corporation will be able to access Traders Cockpit products and services directly through their own website.

Saboo hopes the deal will give the company scale, which it needs after five years in existence. “Now we know that our product idea works and solves a problem. We need to reach out to a lot more users so we are looking to associate ourselves with more distribution players in this arena,” said Saboo.

Is Traders Cockpit just another robo-advisory service like Goalwise? Saboo says it isn't.

Still, Saboo agrees that the proportion of algorithmic trading in the retail segment is small, which means that Traders Cockpit needs a lot more than just marketing to prove its mettle.

Another big concern for the company, Saboo said, is the fact that a lot of people choose to simply invest through mutual funds, which is a passive mode of investing and doesn't require algorithms or active advising.

There is also skepticism in the markets about whether algorithmic models work better than active portfolio managers. Dhirendra Kumar, chief executive officer of Value Research, says robo-advisories and algorithmic trading models have a long way to go before they are considered mainstream.

Kumar added that the market is simply not developed enough for a large number of investors to adopt these complex approaches.

Saboo, however, sees a gap in the market and is betting on it.

“We think there is a gap in the market. This will evolve. India is not a trading heavy nation compared to other countries so you will not find people sitting with algorithms but there is a lot of future and algorithmic trading is where the industry will move eventually,” he said.

This report is part of a series profiling fintech firms changing the way financial services operates in the India. The series will play out every weekend on Bloombergquint.com