EquaMetrics raises $4.5M for algorithmic trading tool

Now retail investors can create their own trading algorithms a la Wall Street

Studies show that women tend to make better investors than men because they’re less likely to take huge, ego-driven risks and they’re more likely to stay level-headed when things go south, while men are more likely to bail when a stock plummets.

If you’re a man and you’re wondering if you can be an investor with your fragile, overly-emotional male brain, take heart, there’s a product just for you! It’s called RIZM—an algorithmic trading tool that lets you plug in different strategies by dragging and dropping (no coding experience necessary). It removes the emotional baggage from trading altogether. The company behind RIZM, EquaMetrics, announced Friday that it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding from private angel investors.

Founded in 2011, the company was in stealth mode for the last two years before launching its first product in June. RIZM is a unique visual programming tool that allows investors to build complex algorithmic trading strategies by simply dragging and dropping up to 30 different options. And users can back test strategies to find out how they’re performed over the years. For example, if you’re looking to trade a particular company’s stock using a trading pattern that typically indicates a positive turn, you can plug it in and run a test to see how that pattern has turned out over the stock’s lifetime.

Of course, if algorithmic trading sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a controversial trading tool on Wall Street, where huge firms have gone up in flames because of malfunctioning algorithms. To EquaMetrics’ credit, RIZM is not a high-frequency trading algorithm builder. Algorithms built using RIZM scan stocks roughly once per minute. In other words, retail investors are not going to bring down Wall Street with another Flash Crash.

"We are excited to announce the close of our seed round and see immense market opportunity for EquaMetrics, especially given early customer adoption of RIZM since its public release," said EquaMetrics founder and CEO Chris Ivey, in a statement. "We are now beginning conversations with strategic partners in the venture community who share our interest in taking RIZM to the next level, revolutionizing the algorithmic trading landscape, and establishing what Wall Street 2.0 means to the world."

The NYC-based company plans to use the new funds to expand company infrastructure and operations, which involves broadening the development cycle, recruiting high-profile executives, and marketing RIZM. 

Image source: stocksonwallstreet.net