Humans are social creatures by nature and the traders among us thrive on speed, convenience and profit. Lucky for us, with today’s innovation in FinTech, trading tools are now more accessible, social and actionable than ever.
Your Differentiator and Conundrum
Traditional trading tools lack any meaningful or, more importantly, actionable social interaction. To bridge that gap and tap into this unmet need, social investing solutions are on the rise. For instance, Instavest, a social digital advisor that allows retail investors to follow and replicate the trades made by lead investors on the platform, created a Twitter-like UI. However, unlike other social investment-focused platforms it went a step further and built a platform that gives investors the ability to instantly act on the ideas of the lead investors in their social circle – in real-time and without ever having to leave the platform.
In order to be able to offer this innovative approach to investing, Instavest had two options when building their platform: spend precious limited resources and a significant amount of capital to create a full brokerage operation in-house, or leverage an open brokerage API solution. They opted for the latter.
Here’s a breakdown on how to set up trades from a social platform using a brokerage API:
Getting Started
By integrating with the Tradier API, a social trading platform or a social digital advisor can gain the ability to establish cost-effective brokerage services, allowing users to immediately act on investment ideas.
This tutorial will explain how to create an application and link it to the Tradier API. It will also outline how to link users' Tradier Brokerage accounts to a platform in order to perform requests on the user’s behalf. While this tutorial will use Django, the concepts can be implemented across any framework or language.
The first step in the path to integrating with the Tradier API is registering a Developer account with Tradier at https://developer.tradier.com. After registering, login to the Tradier Developer account and navigate to the Dashboard. On the dashboard page, click 'Create New Application'. The page will be redirected to the screen below:
To register the app with the Tradier API, a few simple details must be provided (values shown below):
| Field | Description |
| Application Name | This one is pretty self explanatory |
| Website URL | The domain of the website you plan on hosting your application on i.e. https://instavest.com |
| Callback URL | This is the endpoint that Tradier will POST to, to link a user's Tradier account to your platform. |
After submitting your application Tradier will generate the following data (image shown below):
