How to Build a Trading App Like Ticker Tocker?

Ticker Tocker is a rapidly developing social trading marketplace named as 2019's Best New Financial and Market Data Information Solution according to American Business Awards and International Business Awards. Moreover, the platform also won a Gold Stevie Award for the best user interface design in 2020. From this article, you will learn how to create your trading app like Ticker Tocker and monetize it.

Step 1. Project idea and evaluation

At this stage, you, your team, and a business analyst determine your project’s concept. The better you work out your concept, the simpler it will be for developers to implement it in a code and the better result you’ll get.

Here’s what you should think about:

• What target audience you should focus on. Both professionals and beginners can trade on Ticker Tocker. However, the main idea of this project is to help the beginners to become profitable by repeating the actions of experienced traders — leaders. Besides, there are many educational articles and video materials, which are regularly updated, on the platform.
• What platforms the service will work on. You can create a web version, desktop app, and mobile app. Experienced traders prefer a web interface and desktop programs as they have a bigger screen and more capabilities. The complex interfaces scare the beginners.
• What assets will be available for trading. Most traders trade on Forex (fiat currencies) and a stock market (stocks, futures). An increasing number of people trade cryptocurrency during the past few years.
• How exactly it will be possible to trade on your platform. The main feature of Ticker Tocker is social trading. Nevertheless, ordinary trading is possible as well.
• What trading terminal you will use. Whether it’s created from scratch or it’s an integration of trading tools by the API.
• What features you need to implement. At what stage you should create an indicative list and not the final version.

Step 2. The business model of your app

Ticker Tocker is a shareware service for trading currencies, stocks, and other assets. The platform isn’t an exchange – it’s an intermediary between a trader and a broker. The main value proposition of Ticker Tocker is access to leaders — traders, who are experts and who share trading strategies and expert information with other investors through subscriptions. Herewith the feature of copying leaders’ trading operations is included in the subscription.

Every leader has a tailored page displaying an introductory video, a list of their recent, verified trades, and past performance. Due to which a potential subscriber can assess the efficiency of a particular leader just by comparing their trading histories and profits they gained.

The platform makes money in the following ways:

• Subscription for investors. It includes the possibility of subscribing to an expert trader. The price is $160 per month. Keep in mind that while subscribing to many leaders is free, some experts require paid monthly subscriptions.
• Subscription for leaders. A trader has to pay $200 per month to become a leader on the Ticker Tocker platform. For this amount of money, the leader gets the possibility to set paid access to his trading activity, live videos, and educational courses. For instance, the leader may demand payment of additional $500 per month.

According to the platform, the leaders’ products in 2020 were used by more than 10000 investors, which is a 500% increase in comparison with the previous period.

Step 3. Searching and hiring the development company

The next stage of launching such a trading app as Ticker Tocker, — search for a technical partner. As only the custom development is able to provide a sufficient quality of design, functionality, scalability, and security, which similar FinTech projects need. This article tells you where to look and what to pay attention to when searching for an outsourced company: «How to choose crm software development company?».

Step 4. Main features of a Ticker Tocker clone

Mobile solutions for investing and trading stand out among other apps. Aside from such traditional things as registration and authorization, user profiles, notifications, text chat, and the like, your Ticker Tocker clone should have features responsible for trading and enhanced security.

User interface. Most trading apps are oversaturated with functionality and often are confusing, so make sure that the interface of your app will be as simple and easy to use as possible. This is a mandatory requirement since Ticker Tocker, Robinhood, Stash, ETrade, Acorns and other market leaders meet this requirement. Interfaces of their apps are understandable at first glance, thanks to which they can be used even by people, who haven’t made a single trade deal on Forex, the stock market, or the cryptocurrency market.

Here are a few tips that can help you when you’ll be creating an intuitive user interface of such an app as Ticker Tocker:

• make sure that the app interface tackles your target audience’s tasks and reflects their user threads and ways;
• work on design and animation of icons as these are a calling card of any trading app;
• choose a style and a color scheme that are in line with the niche and simultaneously liked by your target audience;
• bet on simplicity and not on creativity;
• remember that design has to be responsive;
• use focus groups and surveys.

Personal accounts. The possibility to open your account is an obvious necessity for any investment platform. This should be a multi-functional personal space, where the users will be able to see what’s going on with their investments and track their results easily and quickly. When making a Ticker Tocker clone, you can make the same feature as the original’s, but not necessarily. Nowadays the competition among the existing apps is very significant, therefore, each one of them offers extremely promising innovations for your users.

For example, the Betterment app allows you to sync user profiles with external investment accounts and contact your personal manager from the support service right through the app. The M1 Finance service has a smart pie chart, which provides the user with an insight into their investment activity. Robinhood allows checking the market news through the app and Ally Invest and Coinbase provide instant access to a wallet with the possibility to deposit and withdraw funds from an account almost instantly.

Investment advisors. We’ve already written that the main thing of Ticker Tocker is access to leaders, who share their strategies and allow copying trading activity. Nevertheless, this is not the only way of implementation of investment advisors. When creating your trading app, you can think of integrating an automated financial advisor in your product.

Investment robo-advisors is a hot trend in this market. They are perfect for those who need professional help at a reasonable price and who want to hand over the management of their accounts to a third party without fear of possible fraud. The best providers of automated robo-advisors are Betterment, Wealthfront, and Vanguard.

The first solution makes it possible for investors to open accounts with a zero balance, whereas two other services require $5 thous. USD and $50 thous. USD on the accounts respectively. That being said, Wealthfront and Betterment are meant for opening general accounts and taxed accounts, while Vanguard can be used to choose a portfolio and contact a financial advisor.

There are more specific investment advisors. For instance, Ellevest specifically focuses on women, who seek to achieve financial independence or save money for certain purposes. Personal Capital allows creating individual investment portfolios аnd Blooom offers management of 401 (k) retirement plans.

A drag-and-drop editor. Another unique feature of Ticker Tocker is an editor that allows you to create signal- and indicator-based trading strategies, similar to how you would create strategies and scans using code within a program like ThinkorSwim. However, Ticker Tocker requires no coding whatsoever.

You simply choose attributes from a menu on the left side of the screen, drag them into the timeline editor and nest if/then and other conditional statements. Once you have created a new strategy, you can backtest it to see how it would have performed historically. The backtest results are highly detailed, showing not only the overall performance of your strategy but also giving information about which holdings in your portfolio performed best and worst under the strategy.

Data security. Most investment apps for iOS and Android use the 2048-bit encryption standard (M1 Finance) or the 256-bit encryption standard (Acorns) to store and transfer financial reports. M1 Finance also uses SIPC Protection to protect large sums of money. Besides, trading services use two-factor authentication (Robinhood) or fingerprints (Betterment) for additional protection of user accounts.

When creating your trading app like Ticker Tocker, think of the following measures of protection of money and confidential data:

• integrate the extended session management (automatic logout and blocking of the possibility of login in case of several failed attempts);
• store confidential data in the logging console;
• consider a possibility of the biometric authentication;
• use the root detection methodology;
• use blockchain technologies.

Notifications of users. When you start creating your trading app, don’t forget to implement push notifications — adjustable alerts and reminders in real-time. They will help to keep users informed of the condition of their accounts and deals. They will also notify them if something unusual happens to their money, account, or profile.

The system in Ticker Tocker notifies of leaders’ activity apart from notifications about changes in the account and provision of information about rates and adjustable prices in real-time. Through notifications, the Vault app requests the users’ permission to transfer a certain percentage of funds to Individual Retirement Accounts (IRA). TD Ameritrade Mobile sends push notifications when the bets reach a certain price.

24-hour help. Determine how the users will be able to contact a personal advisor and/or support service and what they will be like beforehand. Ticker Tocker and Robinhood have convenient help centers, where you can find answers to any questions. Betterment and Acorns are available by phone and email and Coinbase is betting on a supporting bot, which helps in everything — starting with registration and ending with the portfolio creation.

Additional features. Extended functionality improves the user experience and can single your project out among the competitors.

Here are more features that you can add to your investment app:

• free trial version and/or a trading demo-account;
• automatic deduction of taxes, contributions to the pension funds, and the like;
• multi-currency accounts, including ones with the possibility of cryptocurrency trading;
• statistics and user reports with an analysis;
• tools for analyzing and protecting against risks;
• news and/or educational content;
• possibility of charity;
• community.

Step 5. Coding and testing

At this stage, coding will be carried out (server site — backend and a user interface — frontend). Programmers will rely on your project's specifications, which are generated at the previous stages, and implement all features step by step, carry out integrations, connect necessary services, etc. After that, QA specialists will conduct tests to understand whether everything is working, all services are compatible, and there are no errors in the code. After the project passes all checks and corrections, it’s ready to be released.

Step 6. Post-release support

After the product deployment, you should set up the collection of feedback from the users and employees of your company to use this information to improve usability and functionality expansion. In addition, you shouldn’t forget about the improvement of the performance of both the app itself and the backend.

The cost of a Ticker Tocker clone

Development of MVP of a basic trading platform like Ticker Tocker might take 3 to 6 months and the estimated cost of work will be $65 thous. However, you should keep in mind that adding certain complex features and further app improvement will require additional money.