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

realizefi.com

61–70 of 97 posts

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

#61
post #58

My co-founder and I almost made the exact same transition you mentioned. Frustration with Plaid and MX made us wonder if we should just built the integrations ourselves and make that our company. We'd be interested in staying in touch and potentially partnering

Sounds good - feel free to email me at sean@realizefi.com

co-founder shot you an email

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

#62

Are you guys planning on adding IBKR integration?

Absolutely. We don't have a timeline on it as of yet, but we've received several requests for IBKR support (especially from developers building apps that serve non-US markets), so it's something we'll be looking into soon.

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

#63
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…

I used to do this exact thing as a job, and it's crazy how little US brokers do to protect their APIs (at least back when I was doing it around 2015), given the security implications. I'm not even a hacker and I was able to reverse engineer 90% of the US brokerages without a problem. Compare that to Singapore. I spent about an hour toying with the Lim & Tan API before our account got shut down. Apparently the fucking…

We've had the same experience in 2022. An afternoon with an HTTPToolkit interceptor is usually all it takes to reverse engineer a brokerage's API; we spend most of our time paving over various brokerage-specific idiosyncrasies and responding to breaking changes in their APIs. We've discovered that building sane abstractions over the various retail brokerages in the US is a hard design problem given the variability in supported assets, account types, order strategies, authentication strategies, etc.

Thankfully we haven't had to field any calls from irate, sleep-deprived CTOs yet - running experiments against APIs during local business hours only could be a good hack for avoiding those :)

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

#64
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I ask my neighbours for some of their apples, but if they don’t give them, I go into their garden at nighttime with a big ladder…”

Wrong analogy. You’re describing theft. It’s More like, my neighbor planted an apple tree in their yard and told me, “this is your tree. You can pick any fruits off of it, anytime you’d like.” I told the jam making shop down the street that they can come get apples on this tree anytime if they give me some of the apple jam they end up making. My neighbor didn’t explicit permit me to do this, but also didn’t forbid me…

Except that it isn’t you inviting the jam maker, it’s the jam maker saying “I have a direct integration with the guy who manages your apple tree” , when they actually mean “I’ll dress up like you and pick the apples when nobody’s looking”

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

#65
It would be nice to limit scopes on the oauth request. For example an app used just to report on positions and historical performance. I would be very hesitant to give access to by TD account when it says it could make trades on my behalf, but would happily give read-only access.

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

#66
post #65

It would be nice to limit scopes on the oauth request. For example an app used just to report on positions and historical performance. I would be very hesitant to give access to by TD account when it says it could make trades on my behalf, but would happily give read-only access.

Definitely - we've gotten this feedback from several of our users and it's a high-priority item for us. We'll be adding the ability to limit scopes on a per-app basis this week.

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

#68

This looks great! Going to talk this over with my co-founder to include in our list (currently have direct TD Ameritrade interaction) Feature wishlist: - Include Interactive Brokers - Support Options in trades

Thank you! We're going to be adding support for options sometime next week. IB is also on our roadmap, though we don't have an exact timeline for an integration yet.

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

#69
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.

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

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

#70

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.

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!
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