A Conversation With Pierce Crosby
Could you walk me through your career timeline and progression? How did you end up in trading?
Initially traded in college
Living on the west coast
Woke up 5 every morning with interactive brokers account
Definitely a great way to learn a lot of lessons, but not a great way to make returns
Had this interest in media and telecom
Particularly intersection between media and finance
Started school in 2007, as financial crisis was happening
Fast forward to graduation in 2011, world was in shambles
Initially thought he could trade out of recession to make ends meet since there were few jobs out there
Halfway through undergrad, discovered passion for journalism
But have always been more interested in the business side of operations
While at UC Santa Cruz created first broadcast station
Responsible for going out and get propositions proposed to university regents
In exchange for a couple additional dollars in student costs
That budget was created and with that we built the first ever broadcasting station (real-time) to students
On-board professor to sponsor program
Hired a ton of volunteers, part-time workers, etc.
Always the business focus was what attracted him to media
Which led him to graduate school
Big interest to move to NY for a long time
To figure out what to do next
Left California straight out of undergrad and went on to masters in journalism at Columbia University with a specialization in data journalism
Reuters scooped me up before I graduated, but I was also consulting part-time with a firm called Hennessee
But also with a couple early-stage companies looking for people with marketing experience, big need to help people tell their story properly
Which I had from journalism experience
That paid the bills but Reuters ended up taking more time
Within first year, I realized that the scale of progression was fairly linear
My boss had been there upwards of 10 years, his boss for 25+ years
They sat two desks away from me
In reality I was looking at the next 25+ years of my life
Joined an early-stage startup to change that
Keeping that driving force alive
The business behind the scenes was what interested me
I was hired as an intern at StockTwits and they very quickly hired me full-time as an analyst, then director, then senior director
I took over the partnerships, revenue strategies
Ultimately accelerated the growth rate of the business
StockTwits was focused on the US equity markets
TradingView was more of a global force
Offices in NY, but offices all around the world
Japan, Singapore, India, Brazil, Germany, France, italy, South Africa
So the opportunity here was to help them expand their business practice
I’ve always been a trader in the sense that I’m always obsessed with and watching markets
Markets are the driving force for a lot of policies
It’s been great to follow them his entire career
In first capacity as reporter covering markets
Second as analyst inside equity reading company
Third from global, large-picture, macro perspective
What is the hardest thing about trading? And what is your favorite thing?
I think the hardest thing is cutting losses for sure
Discipline is part of that
Having rules in place for a process
One reason why I never devoted 100% of my time is that I was always doing something else
It’s definitely a discipline-sport
Requires high level of expertise
I was more of a casual trader, but cutting losses and actually taking profits
There are good trades and bad trades
The best thing of course is the freedom that comes with it
For a brief period I was running my own money to get by
Which is an amazing concept, but not something I could do long-term
Definitely a great concept in something that definitely drives a lot of retail traders
Ie. not having a boss
Those who do it definitely spend all their time on trading
It’s funny actually, in the journalism world, if you’re a great writer, nobody can say shit to you
You run a strong book of business
Ie. cover a strong portion of the market
If you write very well, there is no reason for folks to come after you
There’s great parallel to that freedom
TradingView has many different resources available, from its charts to its huge community. Could you give a brief overview of what TradingView is and possibly why TradingView over some of the competitors like eToro, or even Bloomberg?
Super-high level
Most lightweight model that offers high performance technology
In previous company, we had a strong tech team but it is nowhere in comparison to TradingView
We have over 170 developers who work on this product 24/7
That’s one of the big differentiating factors for me
We try to provide as much as we possibly can for individual investors
We try to make it as cheap as we can for people to get access
We have real time data on more than 700 equity exchanges
Real time data on macro indicators
FX, commodities, ETF
Try to offer at an extremely low price
That really fits in with my thinking overall
People generally need access to information
The fact that it isn’t nearly as available as it could be always gets me
When I was at Columbia, we had access to Bloomberg terminals
All these terminal products cost between 1000-5000 USD per month
Our average customer’s monthly cost is around 30 USD
Try to be opposite of that expensive model
TradingView recently implemented a function to retrieve alternative datasets via Quandl. What resources on alternative data has or will TradingView offer?
The model is such that the technology we have applies to any dataset
So we can really only work with time-series data
But the level of data we can ingest is basically infinite
We have close to 14 million monthly users
We have an insane level of scale
The infrastructure is set up
I dealt with alternative data at StockTwits and understand the incredible value
Especially since a lot of hedge funds have given significant attention to it
But we are not moving super fast in it
Generally, independent traders or retailer investors aren’t looking for alternative data to enhance their portfolios or strategies
PineScript (the proprietary TradingView code) is moving in that direction
Anything on Quandl today, you can code into TradingView
Can build indicators, alert functions, etc.
It’s definitely our move into the space, but the biggest issue is the quality of the data
We have data up to the early 1900s, while the more nuanced data sets may only have been available for 6 months, which may not be that useful
The heart of TradingView lies in education. Are there any initiatives or programming for educational content in the future?
We do have some interest in doing more in that space
In terms of becoming more consumer friendly
What we’re known as is a platform for people who want to trade more seriously
We have the audience and the capability to work on things like how to use PineScript, indicators, what are the top 10 most popular technical analysis tools, etc.
These are things we can work on
I can’t say much about the product roadmap
But education is a big part for sure
TradingView also allows traders to stream. Could you elaborate more about streaming on TradingView?
We’ve built one of the first streaming platforms for traders
Twitch - very popular game streaming platform
Saw that model and thought we could do it ourselves
What we’re trying to do is become something closer to the trading floor, just in the digital format
We provide the technology, and folks have the opportunity to livestream their daily setups
We have over 500 streamers today and it’s just the beginning
We’ve only beta tested it but we are planning on launching it soon
There are a lot of benefits, from an educational standpoint as well
We provide the tools traders can use
TradingView is very open-source and people can use our resources as they want
TradingView has a very active community. If you are a new trader, how would you filter out the valuable information from the rest?
One thing that’s different about us is that we don’t allow users to delete their ideas
We want to hold people accountable for their trades
There are probably around 25 top ideas regarding specific setups or specific levels
If I’m particularly interested in this one topic, I can drill a popular user
You can go to their profile, see what they trade, what their asset classes are
This can differentiate between good traders and bad traders
And also people who are trading versus people who are promoting something
You can check 5 years of performance
We hope to have more on performance analytics as well
Share performance
Was there anything about social trading that was interesting to you, from StockTwits or TradingView?
To me, all trading is social trading
Even if you are purely algorithmic
These machines or systems rely on some capacity on human behavior or psychology
TradingView and StockTwits both provide a window into the world of traders’ mentality / psychology
I’m a big fan of the crowdsourced model
Aggregate estimate of a thousand is better than a single estimate
For me, I don’t particularly off of other people’s ideas, like the eToro-type model
I’m look at the market and what people are saying overall
And that is enough for me to trade
It really does give you a clear lens of what people are watching, not watching
Talking about and not
When we talk about classic finance, there are stories of emergers coming up, bankruptcies, economic data
A lot of traders are not watching this
They focus on their subsection
Maybe SPY futures or VIX options
They may lose track of these other parts of the market
It’s interesting to see what makes the news, ie what people actually care about
What are your thoughts on the market and the economy right now?
Market does not really reflect the economy
A lot of people say that the market is at an all-time high so the economy is doing well
I don’t buy that
In general we see massive repricing of global interest rates and what that implies is that there is an oversupply of money
What the macro picture signals to me is, across the board, there is going to be big dislocations between countries based on their monetary and fiscal policies
As a result I do think some countries will be the winners on the other side of this
Not specifically because they are economically doing better
But specifically their monetary policies are more aggressive
I’d say that that is my recent takeaway
The economy is in pretty bad shape
In NY, people say we’ll be falling back to normal in the coming weeks
But normal isn;t really going to start coming back until September or november
There’s a huge disconnect between the headlines (reopening in July or June) vs the reality that no one is going to be socializing until the fall comes
There are certain places where that may not hold true
For example I think travel will see a resurgence
I’d also say that more socially distanced activities or events can still take place
That reminds me of a funny story
As a trader does you get really interested in bizarre occurrences in the equities world
There’s a stock called Camping World Holdings
Ancient RV company for the boomers, the fundamental data we have on TradingView shows that they were founded in the 60s
They would buy these houses on wheels and drive all over the country, etc.
The thesis to me is based on historical data
I don’t know anyone interested in RV / I don’t think RVs are a trend
And yet, since the bottom of the recession, we have seen off the lows, up 600%
That to me is really interesting, and i think there will be those outliers
I think generally speaking, in the economic sense, it’ll take a full year to get back to speed
Even then, the world will be different
How was traffic on TradingView looked like throughout the course of the pandemic?
We don’t like to beat our chest on it, especially during these trying times
But we have seen some of our all-time highs
Record traffic in March, April, May
Don’t really see that slowing down
One concern was whether once everyone opened if traffic would decrease
But we definitely don’t see any evidence of that
People are still at home, very much plugged in
It’s become a realization of what we’ve known: we build great products
A lot of people didn’t know what we do
We don’t do marketing
We’re 100% a tech company
We wait for users to come to us and try to have them stick around for a long time by building great products
Have you noticed any change in retail investors’ behavior pre and post pandemic?
The biggest thing I’ve noticed is the trading activity
We see a lot more active trading
Difference in trading volume, but also number of orders
More time to trade since everyone is home
But also correlated with the 0 commission trend across industry
For 80-90% of assets
Friction around trading essentially 0
But pandemic has definitely amplified that
TradingView is regularly updated and product-focused. What are some of the short-term goals? Long-term goals?
Short-term goals
This year: growth goals, etc.
But strategic goals are focused on providing educational side of the business
That’s the biggest short term goal
Long-term goal
To be able to do 80-90% of what Bloomberg is able to do
Written by Gihyen Eom & Edited by Alexander Fleiss