Equities

Trade: governed execution for your desk.

Trade is the Next.js trading surface on Project0 Core. Your team keeps capital and compliance authority. Agents and scanners do the volume work of screening, documenting, and routing proposals so approvals stay fast and every meaningful step lands in ProjectLedger.

Same team. Governed. More capable.

Available as: Acquisition (Day-1 Founder)

Status: Available to acquire

Talk about Trade → See all six platforms →
01 The premise

Augment the operating layer between data and fills.

Trade augments the operating layer between market data and broker fills. It is built for teams that already have a research view but choke when ideas turn into gated orders, audit packets, and multi-person approvals.

What it augments: portfolio managers, traders, risk and compliance staff, and operations leaders who touch equities workflows daily.

What it does not replace: your prime broker relationship, your regulatory registrations, your investment committee's judgment on thesis, or your responsibility for suitability and disclosure. The product does not certify you to any rule. It gives you compliance-ready architecture (immutable-style ledger entries, role gates, export hooks) that you map to your own policies and counsel.

What you should expect: higher throughput of reviewed opportunities, fewer approval loops lost in chat, and a defensible narrative when someone asks who approved what and when. You should not expect automatic headcount removal. Capacity goes up because repetitive scaffolding is systematized, not because humans are deleted from the loop.

02 Why now

More advisers. More assets. More compliance load per dollar of edge.

The advisory and brokerage ecosystem is larger and more instrumented every filing cycle. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission staff publish Investment Adviser Statistics from Form ADV. In the December 2024 period, the staff count 21,669 SEC-registered investment advisers and exempt reporting advisers combined, up from 21,380 in 2023 on the same methodology. Aggregate regulatory assets under management reported by advisers reached $145.8 trillion in 2024 on the same report's Table 2.1, with the report's own footnotes noting double-counting conventions in RAUM. More advisers and more reported assets mean more proposals, more logs, and more reviewer hours per dollar of edge.

Parallel to AUM growth, financial crime and compliance workloads keep expanding. LexisNexis Risk Solutions reported in a 21 February 2024 press release that the commissioned True Cost of Financial Crime Compliance Study (U.S. and Canada) (Forrester Consulting, survey fielded May to June 2023) found financial crime compliance costs had increased for 99% of financial institutions in the study, with total annual cost in the United States and Canada at U.S.$61 billion, and 70% prioritizing cost cuts in the next twelve months while staying inside regulatory lines.

Hiring another analyst or compliance associate is the default answer. It lengthens ramp time, adds recruiter load, and still leaves you with ad hoc spreadsheets when the auditor asks for a single thread from idea to fill. Trade is the alternative when you want software-enforced policy, human authority preserved in the UI, and ledger-backed evidence without pretending a model replaces your license.

Primary sources. SEC, Investment Adviser Statistics (Form ADV, period ending December 2024): sec.gov/files/investment/im-investment-adviser-statistics-20250430.pdf (Tables 1.3, 2.1). LexisNexis Risk Solutions, "Study Reveals Annual Cost of Financial Crime Compliance Totals $61 Billion in the United States and Canada," 21 February 2024: risk.lexisnexis.com/global/en/about-us/press-room/press-release/20240221-true-cost-of-compliance-us-ca

03 Illustrative capacity model

Same headcount. More governed actions per hour.

Traditional model
  • Same headcount
  • Each incremental sleeve means more manual proposal docs and more standups
  • Each new portfolio multiplies spreadsheet tabs and email threads
  • Scale ceiling equals how many humans can attend meetings
Augmented model
  • Same headcount
  • The same team runs more proposals through a shared scanner, simulation gate, and approval panel
  • Additional portfolios plug into the same firm shell with cookie-scoped context and role-aware routes
  • Scale ceiling equals how many governed actions the stack can record per hour without losing sign-off quality

Specific capacity numbers depend on your workflow mix, how many symbols you watch, and how strict your simulation and quorum rules are. The magnitude is what we model together after we see a week of real proposal traffic. Directionally, the workflow is aimed at a state where open proposals stop going stale because ranking, rationale, and next actions stay inside one surface instead of five tools.

Initial adoption
One production or paper portfolio with human-led authority and exports off.
Fluency
Firm admins add members, tune approval policy, and use the client portal for read-only stakeholders.
Full firm use
Multiple portfolios share controls templates and compliance pulls ledger CSV on a cadence you define.
04 The real math

Cost of growth, with and without Trade.

Table 1: Cost of growth without Trade
Growth cost (hiring)
Estimated annual cost
2 additional financial analysts (loaded base, two FTE)
$200,000 to $280,000
Recruiter fees (often 20 to 25% of first-year cash comp per hire)
$40,000 to $120,000
Ramp productivity loss (3 to 6 months not at full output per hire)
$30,000 to $80,000
Extra compliance tooling seats tied to headcount
$8,000 to $25,000
Net directional cost of "hire your way out"
$278,000 to $505,000

Salary anchor. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2023, "Financial and Investment Analysts," national median annual wage $99,010 (SOC 13-2051): bls.gov/oes/2023/May/oes132051.htm. Applied here as two mid-level FTE with benefits load approximated inside the range rather than as a precise payroll quote.

Table 2: Cost of growth with Trade
Growth cost (platform)
Estimated annual cost
Platform license or acquisition economics
Pricing on conversation
Additional hires for the same proposal throughput
$0
Recruiter fees for those avoided hires
$0
Ramp time for the governed workflow
Minutes to days for configuration, not quarters for net-new employees

The cost of augmentation is a fraction of the cost of hiring for many desks. The exact delta depends on your current vendor stack, broker fees, and whether you run paper or live capital. We want to model it with your actual headcount, locations, and audit calendar.

Footnote. All figures are illustrative benchmarks based on publicly available data and modeled team structures. They illustrate directional capacity expansion, not specific buyer claims. We pressure-test against real inputs in conversation.
05 Task operationalization

What agents handle. What stays human.

What agents and automation handle
What stays human
Portfolio leadershipRanked scan output, draft rationales, duplicate proposal checks against open work, calibration-aware nudges.
Mandate, concentration limits versus client agreements, final veto on thesis, and communication to boards or clients.
Trading deskPreparing order parameters that already passed rules, surfacing simulation pass or fail, queueing execute after explicit approval when policy requires it.
Price discretion inside policy, choosing when to deviate from the model stack, and escalation when markets gap.
RiskContinuous evaluation of proposals against saved limits, cooldown timers, and execution windows pulled from the same API the desk uses.
Setting the limit values, approving exceptions, and signing off stress assumptions.
Compliance and legal supportGenerating structured exports from ledger endpoints, preserving authority labels on each event, pointing reviewers to hashes and timestamps in Core.
Filing decisions, interpreting regulation for your firm, and deciding what leaves the building to a regulator.
OperationsRunning the onboarding wizard for a new portfolio id, broker default selection, optional credential capture through Core APIs.
Custodian relationships, cash movement outside the app, and vendor procurement.
Engineering and securityOperating the BFF, rotating API keys, CI checks documented in the repo verification guide.
Owning cloud contracts, DPA negotiation, and incident response policy.

This is not headcount reduction. This is upgrading what humans do so their signatures mean more and their time buys more decisions per week.

06 Phased adoption

Each phase builds trust. Each phase produces measurable results.

First 30 days
One portfolio, human-led authority, paper or small live slice. You validate scanner usefulness, simulation gate behavior, and ledger visibility. Senior engineering spends roughly 2 to 4 hours per week on Core URL, keys, and Firebase alignment.
Day 30 to 90
Add firm roles, approval quorum if needed, and optional client portal readers. Tune loss caps and windows based on real fills. Compliance runs the first export sample against your internal checklist.
Month 3 to 6
Multi-portfolio operations with shared templates, recurring export cadence, and authority modes matched to each sleeve's risk tolerance.

You move at your own speed.

07 Trust and ownership

What we do. What we do not do.

What we do

Your data does not train any model

Project0 does not use your portfolio data, proposals, or trade records to train, fine-tune, or improve any model. This is contractual.

Your data stays in your control

Trading is a surface; durable stores and rules enforcement live in Core and your cloud projects. You hold admin access to those projects in a standard deployment.

Deletion is real

Retention and deletion follow the policies you configure in the underlying stores; engineering documents the mechanics in SOC 2 prep notes, not marketing slogans.

Sub-processor transparency

Sub-processor list (Vercel, GCP, Firebase, optional Gmail SMTP, and optional Sentry) is documented and extended under your entity at acquisition.

What we do not do

Access your systems without authorization

No broker credentials are required to browse the UI; keys you enter go through your chosen integration path to Core, not through a hidden back channel.

Make decisions without human approval

Default patterns in the shipped UI emphasize human-led or human-in-the-loop authority; autonomous mode exists only inside the rules you saved.

Lock you in

You can read the open verification playbook in the repo and run the stack locally against Core; acquisition conversations cover IP and continuity explicitly.

Compete with your business

Trade is infrastructure for your mandates, not a competing allocator raising its own fund on your signals.

08 Engagement shape

Acquisition (Day-1 Founder).

The commercial path we emphasize is acquisition (Day-1 Founder), consistent with the homepage tile. Expect a 30 to 60 day pilot on a single portfolio with clear success metrics (time to approve, simulation coverage, export completeness). A full 18 month style engagement, including a Founding Partner Agreement shape, is how we structure deep integration, shared roadmap, and pricing that reflects your volume. Founding Partner pricing rewards early adopters who co-develop policy templates and verification steps. Your senior engineering time in pilot weeks stays in the 2 to 4 hour band for connectivity; expanding to multi-portfolio firm mode adds light ongoing touch for membership and key rotation, not a second platform team.

Trade is built on Project0 infrastructure.

Project0. From nothing, create something.