As a trader in my early twenties, I experienced countless moments where I thought, “I wish there was a product that did this!” I was surprised that these products didn’t exist or weren’t built properly, despite being such excellent ideas (right?!). After a few years of trading with some moderate success, I found myself feeling burnt out from the daily grind of discretionary mean-reversion intraday trading. It was during this time that I realized I had to take action and build the products that I wished existed, as nobody else seemed up to the task. So, six years ago today, I founded this company with the ultimate goal of helping retail traders become profitable. At the time, I was only 25 and bursting with ideas, completely unaware of the challenges that lay ahead.

“I wish I could multiply what I earn, but kept doing the same thing”

Our first product was essentially a copy-trading platform, where successful traders got rewarded for their trading signals. While it wasn’t an original idea, we executed it in a unique way (at the time anyway). I figured the scalability will be the biggest issue since I saw it in my own trading. The bigger account I was trading with, the heavier the trading decisions.

To tackle this, we allowed traders to continue trading with the account size and broker they were familiar with, on the platform of their choice. We rewarded them based solely on the quality of their signals, which were calculated based on the number of pips generated in predictable market conditions. The quality of the signal was a fairly complex calculation. But the idea can be boiled down to providing a lot of pips in predictable market conditions = better signal.

The key to beating the markets was consistency. We rewarded traders who consistently provided good signals. The longer they could provide high-quality signals, the more rewards they earned. The platform generated an overwhelming interest from traders, but as time went on, we found that very few of them managed to remain consistently profitable. While we had some success stories where traders used their rewards to buy a house, fund their dream honeymoon, or make a dream trip from Bangladesh to New York, most traders couldn’t survive in the program for more than a year.

When we interviewed the best performers and asked them what went wrong, most responses revolved around emotions and a lack of discipline interfering with their trading success. As they began earning more and more rewards, they started focusing on the money rather than the quality of their trades, compromising their trading systems and eventually losing money. Despite our efforts to remove this variable from their thought process, it was simply not enough.

“I wish I could remove emotions from my trading”

After conducting several rounds of interviews with hundreds of users, we decided to create an algorithmic trading platform that allowed users to develop custom and unique trading strategies without requiring any coding knowledge. By typing in plain English, the algorithm would be generated automatically in the background, and users could deploy their strategies to their connected broker or crypto exchange and start live trading. The platform was asset-agnostic, broker-agnostic, and we sourced and cleaned the data for users at a fraction of the cost. Sounds great, right? Well, it was, for a little while.

While it sounded great in theory, we soon realized that we had bitten off more than we could chew. As a small startup with only a handful of people, we set out to make this tremendously ambitious project, but inevitably technical challenges caught up to us. Each individual user had specific demands and requests – for example, a trader from Chicago wanted new data sets, a trader from Hong Kong needed a 6-hour timeframe, another from South Africa had issues with their spot crypto trade, and a trader from the UK requested the Ichimoku Cloud indicator.

As we tried to accommodate each user’s requests, we found ourselves constantly shifting our focus away from improving the platform as a whole. In hindsight, it was clear that we could never make everyone happy and we should’ve been okay with letting some paid users go. We learned a great deal from this experience.

“I wish there was a trading platform, that actually helps me trade better”

We realized that to improve our users’ trading results, we needed to take a step back and assess what features they actually needed. What sets our Cleo trading platform apart from the competition? What is our edge?

Over the course of a year, we listened to our users’ feedback, ideas, and observed how they use the Cleo trading platform to identify any missing pieces. Some of the comments were expected, while others were surprising, but all helped us to focus on what really matters. What matters to our users, matters to us, and we’re now bringing it all together on cleo.finance.

We’re still a small startup, so we will be releasing updates to our platform in waves. First and foremost, we wanted to create a trading platform that truly supports traders. We asked ourselves and our most active traders: what is the most crucial factor to consider before entering a market position? The answer was clear: understanding the risk and rewards of that particular trade. It’s surprising that this information isn’t easily accessible on most trading platforms, but there’s an obvious reason for it. The majority of traders have to rely on their own mental math skills or custom sheet templates (making MS Excel arguably the most used trading software ever).

Cleo Trading Platform: Gain control over the markets.

Introducing cleo.finance, the trading platform that empowers you to trade smarter. With our platform, you’ll have access to a wealth of information that will help you make more informed decisions. We understand that one of the biggest challenges in trading is managing risk, which is why we’ve made it our priority to give you a visual representation of the risks and rewards associated with each position before you even enter it.

But that’s just the beginning. Our platform allows you to place multiple stop loss and take profit orders, modify them as needed, and even replay your trading history to learn from your past. And with our smart trade capabilities, you can enter or exit a position based on your specific conditions, removing emotions from your trading decision-making process.

And that’s not all. We’re constantly working to improve and add new features to the Cleo Trading Platform, including copy-trading and algo-trading capabilities. We’re excited about what the future holds and can’t wait for you to see what we have in store.

Now, 6 years after starting this journey, our goal remains the same. Retail traders fulfill an important role in society. And supporting them in becoming profitable remains our mission we work tirelessly and passionately towards. I am sure it won’t be smooth sailing from here on, but I can promise you we are here to stay.

We hope to be a part of your trading journey and help you achieve your financial goals. Thank you for your support and stay tuned for more updates.