Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

realizefi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 97 posts

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#81

Post by LittleGecko »

timothygoltser wrote: post #70
LittleGecko wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not offering first 3 accounts for free to test integrations? would help massively rather than paying $300 to discover it can't integrate.

We provision both a live and sandbox app with 3 free test links each so that you can test out the API after signing up - we'll make sure to display that more prominently on our site/in our docs to avoid confusion on this point. Thanks for the feedback!

probably my bad, I didn't pay attention to it enough, I just read this post on this particular point. very good, my criticism is not valid then.

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#82

Post by melony »

seandoh wrote: post #35
melony wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you plan to offer a more developer friendly pricing?

We're still experimenting with pricing and would be happy to hear your thoughts on what sort of price structure would be more developer friendly. To set our current pricing, we looked at comparable companies like Plaid. By the way, you can start testing with live accounts for free (maxed out at 3) by creating an account here https://www.realizefi.com/register .

It would be better if e.g. the first 50 can be priced at $5 per user per month and once the growth hits $300, revert to $1 per user.

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#83

Post by ceejayoz »

sjtgraham wrote: post #74
ceejayoz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "direct integrations" as a euphemism from "using reverse-engineered private APIs in violation of their terms" is dishonest.

It's not as long as they expressly state there is no relationship or endorsement with the brokerages where there isn't one.

Perhaps. The current site and documentation appears to lack anything of the sort.

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#84

Post by sjtgraham »

ceejayoz wrote: post #83
sjtgraham wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as long as they expressly state there is no relationship or endorsement with the brokerages where there isn't one.

Perhaps. The current site and documentation appears to lack anything of the sort.

It’s a brand new company. Give them a chance to work these things out.

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#85

Post by tehwebguy »

timothygoltser wrote: post #37
koolba wrote: post #33

Is there any brokerage who’s terms of service or fraud liability protections aren’t entirely waived by using a service like this? Do end users provide the credentials for their brokerage accounts? I can’t imagine any infosec officer or general counsel at a brokerage agreeing to screen scraped data collection. They already get enough legal threats for bad pricing / bad execution, this would be an entirely new can of w…

We do sanctioned integrations with brokerages wherever OAuth integrations are available such that we don't have to collect credentials, but for the ones without public APIs we do need to collect credentials (though we never store them). Unfortunately, the industry is in a mode where brokerages will develop anti-screen-scraping technology and data aggregators will develop new and creative solutions to evade detection…

Can you explain how you collect credentials but don’t store them?

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#86

Post by timothygoltser »

tehwebguy wrote: post #85
timothygoltser wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do sanctioned integrations with brokerages wherever OAuth integrations are available such that we don't have to collect credentials, but for the ones without public APIs we do need to collect credentials (though we never store them). Unfortunately, the industry is in a mode where brokerages will develop anti-screen-scraping technology and data aggregators will develop new and creative solutions to evade detection…

Can you explain how you collect credentials but don’t store them?

We collect a user's credentials (usernames + passwords) and exchange them immediately for access and refresh tokens. We use the term "credentials" as we've seen it used colloquially - access and refresh tokens certainly fall under the formal definition of credentials, but we usually call them "sensitive tokens" or something similar.

Additionally, in the case of an API like Webull's which accepts a salted MD5 hash of the user's password, the user's plaintext password will never touch our servers.

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#87

Post by steakknife »

Lol, we had literally this exact startup: TradeIt (https://web.archive.org/web/20200817053226/https://www.trade...). Launched about 7 years ago, had official OAuth integrations with most major brokers, an API, and native mobile SDKs that had customizable UI for portfolio/order management/trading/market data. We had some really big customers like Yahoo Finance. Sold to another company about 3 years ago. The buyers had no idea what they were buying and let it rot and eventually shut it all down. Fun times. If we could have held on until WSB went viral a few years back I think we could have been very big. Oh well. Maybe you guys can succeed where we left off. Good luck!

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#88

Post by bdkoepke »

vmception wrote: post #48

I've dealt with a lot of these over the last decade, here is my wishlist: - Multi-legged options trading - Portfolio Margining (and SPAN) system - Cross asset and cross portfolio margin management, inherited by Portfolio Margining regulations most API trading services don't allow access to options contracts, or if they do (such as Tradier), they only have the inferior plebeian Reg-T margin which barely makes any sens…

None of the retail brokers (including ibkr) do this correctly, although ibkr is probably the best for retail. Their cross-margining for futures options doesn't work (since the options are treated as "securities" and the futures are treated as "commodities", they treat them as segregated accounts).

They do handle multi-legged options trading, and implement SPAN correctly within the futures space. Portfolio Margining is not always correct (they don't implement customer portfolio margin baskets right), and be aware that margin can *and does* change drastically, particularly during financial crisis.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/an-empirical-ana... (p38-45).

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#89

Post by steakknife »

timothygoltser wrote: post #6
melony wrote: post #2

Reminds me of https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190403005265/en/Tra... How does your pricing work?

We see ourselves as somewhat of a spiritual successor to TradeIt - we're trying to provide high-quality access to brokerage accounts so that people can build better investing apps on top of existing brokerages. In terms of pricing: we charge a $300/mo base fee for your first 300 linked brokerage accounts, then $1/linked account/mo thereafter, with reduced pricing at various levels of scale.

Howdy, I used to run engineering at TradeIt. Just curious if any of y'all ever had any interactions with us back in the day, and if any of the brokerages mentioned us (I'm guessing they will either have really nice or really not nice opinions if they remember us, depending on the nature of our integration with them ). We had so many partners on both the broker and developer side, would be fun to know who picked up the torch after we dropped it. Feel free to DM if you ever want to chat about it.

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#90

Post by steakknife »

danielvaughn wrote: post #38
timothygoltser wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We see ourselves as somewhat of a spiritual successor to TradeIt - we're trying to provide high-quality access to brokerage accounts so that people can build better investing apps on top of existing brokerages. In terms of pricing: we charge a $300/mo base fee for your first 300 linked brokerage accounts, then $1/linked account/mo thereafter, with reduced pricing at various levels of scale.

Ha, nice! I used to work at TradeIt, and was about to reach out to some of my former co-workers and tell them about you. It's no small undertaking, congrats on the launch.

Hi Daniel, we're already in the comments section :) Hope you're doing well!
Post reply on HN