Sebastian Raffaele
Appearances
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
But just be aware that when you're actually trading live in a market, there's a lot of metrics that are not going to be showing up when you're doing these demos. I hear you saying we.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
The culture of what we've built. And I think the team we've built is our biggest asset. Me and Costa got the business off the ground. But if we didn't build this team, we wouldn't have got anywhere. And I understand that at the deepest level. I even got stuck in moments where I'm like, oh, we want to do it all ourselves, but it's just unrealistic.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
You need to find people who, one, have the skill set you're looking for, but also I think it's about finding people who are really passionate about what you're doing within your business. Costa looks after hiring the team of our sales reps, and I've always looked after hiring the developers that work under me.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
My biggest thing is I want to hire someone who sees this company as their own, who literally comes in and works and they can see the vision as much as we can. We don't want to hire someone that is just going to be here to get a pay packet.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And there's nothing wrong with people who go out there and work jobs that they're not passionate about to build themselves up into a position where they can do what they want. Because I did that for most of my life. For a long time, I wasn't in a position where I had a lot of money or was financially stable.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Like I was working nine to fives to build myself into a point where I could do a job that I was passionate about. But once I had the opportunity, I ran with it. And for me, I've spoken to a lot of different quantitative mathematicians, developers, all sorts of people who had all the skills in the world, right? But sometimes a resume and skills doesn't actually translate to fitting into a team.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And fitting into a team goes so much deeper than that. Now, we're still small family business at the moment. We've got about 20 employees. We're rapidly growing. Something that's always been really important to me is having like a family culture and a culture where, you know, everyone in the workspace feels safe, but also we push each other to be better versions of ourselves.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Now, obviously when you're in a sales environment, things can get very competitive. I feel blessed because our team doesn't really feel like that. Even our sales reps, they're always pushing to be the best version of themselves. And when someone's having a better month than the other guy, everyone's happy for them. But what I'm looking for
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Someone who has, yeah, the skill, but what I want more than anything else is someone who can understand what we're doing and someone who sees this business as their own. I want someone to come in with that level of passion because I know when they get up in the morning, they feel like they're working on something that's going to change the landscape of the market.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And that's the biggest thing for me. And passion and excitement to do this is really important because that's going to, at the end of the day, produce the best result. right? You could have all the skills in the world, but if that person isn't interested in the work they're doing, that doesn't actually really translate to results. I haven't always been perfect with hiring.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
I've made mistakes and hired the wrong people before, for sure. But I think after a few different situations, I started to understand that passion and excitement and seeing the vision for me is the most important thing. I feel so grateful to be surrounded by these people because we wake up every day and we have the same vision.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Oh man, definitely. This has not been this straight line up on a chart, gold, green candle of us just growing. Man, we've made so many mistakes. It's not even funny. And we've made mistakes where the business hasn't always been in a good position because of that. I think we had a couple of times where we tried to scale based on the wrong numbers, right?
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Thinking that we had a full grasp on the business and we were collecting a decent amount of cash, but We had a few moments where we scaled based on revenue. That really bit us in the ass, excuse my language, because we weren't looking clearly enough at what we needed to scale. So yeah, we've hit points where we've had to drop ad spend.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
We've had to get our sales reps to build up more internal sales through the pipeline that we already had. something we weren't looking at was pushing for referral sales. And this really changed the landscape of our business as well, because when you're delivering a product at a high level and it's working very well, you get more referrals.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
So something I said to myself as well, I was like, look, a lot of people are happy, but the referrals just aren't there. This has to be
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
an issue inherently with the product you can't blame it on anything else because your referral sales should be skyrocketing if your product's delivering so that was another kind of thing for us to look at to know we had to develop the product even further because the referral sales weren't there
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Definitely two moments where we really hit a rock and it put us backwards for a bit, simply scaling too fast, trying to just assume that what we had in front of us was ready to be taken to the next level.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
We definitely made that mistake twice, but what we've realized now, sometimes scaling too fast and getting excited and trying to do it all really quickly, that was definitely not the answer because it bit us in the foot twice. Growing your business needs to be a combination not only of paid marketing, but you need organic marketing as well.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
You need ways for people to get onto your product without you having to pay money to acquire them. Now we have this kind of flow where we have the right balance of organic and paid marketing, and it's allowing us to grow without hemorrhaging our cash flow. Now, I'm not going out there and telling people listening to this, don't try and scale your business quickly.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
I'm just letting you know what happened to us when we tried to do that twice. It actually sent us backwards and sometimes for months at a time. I have no problem admitting that because this whole journey, Noah, has been making mistakes to understand what to do next. It hasn't been just rapid straight line growth the whole time.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And every time we make a mistake, yeah, in the moment, you're emotional and frustrated. But all of our progress has come out of mistakes. And that to me is like the most important thing. It's understanding when you go wrong, this doesn't mean your business is done. This means you need to evaluate what you did, make sure you don't do it again, and then push forward past that.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Oh man, I think definitely I'm most proud of the team. I'm definitely proud of the product. I want to put the team first because like I said earlier to you, Noah, I've met so many entrepreneurs and so many people who have such good ideas, right? Like really smart, genius ideas, but that doesn't always translate into success in a market environment.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
The team we've built has been the catalyst for the product to get to where it is.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And I'm so incredibly proud of the product because it's gone from something that really functioned at a small capacity to a point where now, when we were showing our product at Bitcoin in Nashville, the overwhelming response we got from quantitative traders, from mathematicians who had been in the space for years, like, Everyone was so excited about what we built when we showed them.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And I think that was such a affirming kind of thing to see because we knew already what we had built and we'd had a good response online. But going to an event in person and seeing that really gave us another level of confidence. It's the team all day because you can have the best product on earth. But if you don't surround yourself with the right people, it's not going to succeed.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And that's not me giving a doomsday scenario. I'm just trying to be honest and just let people know. Like you need to put all your value into your team.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
The biggest mistake I made, and I think I wish I had this advice 10 years ago when I first came into the market, the biggest mistake myself and we made as a team was trying to aggressively get returns out of the cryptocurrency market. And this took such a long time to understand. We got our product to the point where...
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
was using a combination now of quantitative maths but also technicals which in the space was innovative at the time we figured a way to combine these two things which traditionally hadn't been really done at scale yet so once we had that we started really running the algorithms quite aggressively and we had months to be honest with you where we were pulling quite a lot out of the market in terms of a percentage and we were saying wow this is crazy
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And this is the thing with the market as well is it can make you crazy a little bit in the sense that it can sometimes even give you a God complex because you're just simply pulling money almost out of nothing. So you're like, as a human, we see that as, wow, this is really exciting and crazy, but it blinds you once again to what the market is going to do.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And what the market is going to do is take money away from you when you're trying to push too hard. So we made that mistake running the algorithms really aggressively and trying to make money really fast. And I think It's so funny because it comes down to the same thing over and over again.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Like the analogy I gave you at the start of the podcast, like you don't want to become a doctor and then wake up qualified. The market is exactly the same. You don't decide you want to be rich and then wake up rich. The market is something that takes time to pull money out of.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
So once we strip that back and started to run the algorithms significantly less aggressively and built in a model that actually covered the downside completely, this is where the product really started excelling. Everyone can make money while the market's going up, but no one's making money when the market's going down and when the market's going sideways.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
So we actually realized the key in a financial market is to cover the downside and the upside will take care of itself. And the key is to not try and make money really quickly because you may have a good calendar year, you may have a good few months,
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
But even running an automated system is no different to manual if you're pushing it to its limits, trying to pull really fast monthly percentages out of the market. So we realized with our product, as soon as we had that moment, yeah, it was disappointing. Yeah, I lost a little bit of money. I'm happy to admit that. But at the end of the day, What we got out of that mistake was where we are now.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And now we understand that if you want to trade a financial market, this is something that is going to take time. You're not going to wake up and be a millionaire and achieve all your dreams straight away, even running an automated system. It requires patience and it requires an understanding that this is a vehicle that can create you passive income.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
That in itself is so powerful, but don't go and try and push it to the point where it's replacing your salary or things like this, because until you get there, until you have the actual capital to let the system do that for you, you have to see the vision. And that's the most important thing. These parameters and these systems can't be pushed too hard. There needs to be a blend of risk and reward.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And to be honest, that blend should be significantly more on the side of risk-adversity and running the system at a very low scale to pull consistency and sustainability out of the market.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
We got so many exciting things coming at the moment. Me and Costa are developing our own in-house software from scratch. So at the moment, our product uses a combination of traditional centralized exchanges, Coinbase, Kraken, Bybit, things like this. And we also use TradingView.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And then we use a product, a third-party product that sits directly in the middle to communicate with essentially the exchange and TradingView. Now, we've been using this product for a while. We really wanted to build our own software so we could bring things more in-house. And this is something we're so excited about.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
The software essentially is going to allow our algorithms to not only run faster, but run at a much higher capacity. Just to be clear, this isn't a platform. Once again, we're still a software provider. Everyone's funds where they're trading with us, they always have total control over. They always sit on the centralized exchanges.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
But having this software is going to allow our algorithms to execute at a much higher level and also bring our whole ecosystem in-house. The software is on pace to be finished potentially at the end of the year. Once again, with software development, I understand how it works, but there's a reason I'm not giving a specific date.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
But that's essentially what we're focusing on in terms of the software. In terms of the company, we're scaling pretty organically and well at the moment.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
we are looking to eventually bring on more staff to our support teams in san francisco and build out what we have in place but one thing i'm really excited about is where the product is now and the team we've built man this is why i'm so proud of them because i wake up all most of our teams in america and our time zones are completely off so i wake up at six in the morning and i've got 120 messages on slack with a team having made progress while i was asleep and this is you know
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
The most beautiful thing to watch because these guys, they wake up and they're so passionate about making this better. And that doesn't always translate into success. But just seeing the passion, that's all I really care about at the end of the day. The success in making the algorithm better is something that just happens naturally through having passion for your workers.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
watching these guys build it out and where the product is going it's really exciting i do feel like we're strapped onto a rocket ship at the moment and we won't make the mistake of scaling too fast again but it's almost feeling like now this thing's going to scale quickly organically and this is the position we've always wanted to be in let's switch to you tell me about who influences the way that you work name a person or many persons or something that you look up to and why
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Jim Simons, he's a mathematician and quantitative trader. He's the founder of Renaissance Technologies. They're essentially a hedge fund from quite a long time ago. And the cool thing about them is AI has become this buzzword that everyone's so excited about, but people don't realize AI has been around for like 20 or 30 years.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
So Jim Simons was building backtesting and reprocessing environments, and they were running them in the 80s and the 90s. So these guys were so ahead of the curve. The reason I look up to him
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
is he's the kind of person who always had vision for what he wanted to do but really took him a very long time to get to where he wanted to be even at 52 years old he was still sitting in front of the market trying to understand how to pull money out of it and he still hadn't done it right so someone like that inspires me and i inspire to be like him because of his tenacity and also his ability to block out the noise
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
He was working with genius mathematicians and he was a genius himself, but they were telling him, Jim, this model and what you're trying to do, it's not going to work. You can't pull money out of the market.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And back then, conceptually automated systems was something people just laughed at because they were in a traditional financial environment like the stock market where a lot of these guys on Wall Street were using intuition and experience and news and fundamental analysis and things like this. And Jim was trying to bring forward something that for the most of them, they just laughed at.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And they didn't believe he could do it. At 52 years old, he started to find ways to pull money out of the market. Within 10 to 20 years, Noah, he created the greatest hedge fund that's ever existed on planet Earth. They had an average historical yearly return of 66%. And he became a man who developed hundreds of billions of dollars. Everyone around him told him he couldn't do it.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
His family, his wife, his friends, no one believed he could do it except for him. And I think this is some advice I can give to people out there is you have to be able to block out the noise. And sometimes that even may be blocking out your family. And it's not having any anger towards them about that.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
You just have to realize that sometimes rather than just telling people what you're going to do, just go do it. Because at the end of the day, when you get there, people are going to be happy for you regardless. Just not everyone is going to see the vision you do. And there's nothing wrong with that. But you have to block out the noise.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And I think he's my biggest inspiration for that reason because his odds of pulling off what he did was so low, but he knew he could do it. He knew. And I feel the same. Our odds of pulling this off were slim to none. We didn't have any investors. We didn't have any backing. We did the whole thing ourselves. And, you know, my conviction is as high as it was back then.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Even though there's been times of doubt and even though there's been hard times, I still know where we're going and that's something that has always been inspiring to me.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
In a way, no, I'm almost going to talk to myself from 20 years ago now, right? Because I really feel like I needed advice and everyone does.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
single-handedly the best advice i can give a young entrepreneur is to stay grounded stay humble don't let all the outside influence take control of your brain because in this space like it's pretty crazy knowing you can go from not having a lot to making a lot of money really quickly but i really believe in many ways that was detrimental because you start to lose focus on what you're doing and you focus on other things and i think this is so important but if you're going to build something and you're going to build a product
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
that people are going to get excited to buy, you need to stop thinking about what's in it for you. And you need to think about what you're going to deliver on a basis to your clients. And this is the most important thing. Because if you're looking at this as a vehicle to make wealth or to get rich, okay, there's nothing wrong with that.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
But the inherent problem is your path's not going to go the way you want it to. And you're probably going to fail. Because you need to look at building something that's going to first deliver the customer a result. And what's going to come out of that is success for yourself. It's simply putting other people before you. And that's really important when you're building a business.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Otherwise, what will happen is you'll focus so much on getting an outcome for yourself that won't translate into results, right? People don't want that. Stay humble. Block out the noise. Definitely block out the noise.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Have high conviction in what you're doing, but also have the vision to understand that if this doesn't make you an overnight success or if you don't get really wealthy really quickly, in a lot of ways, that's a good thing.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
going to teach you how to understand connecting with humans at a key level right is the most important thing and when you put your customers ahead of everything and when you put the success of your clients ahead of you trying to get wealthy what you're going to find is you'll start to not only have success but you'll actually attract the right people to your team as well and this is really important as well like we wanted to build a team where people would wake up and be excited to work with us
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Not a team where people woke up and looked at how good we are and our achievements and they wanted to follow on that path. That's not what it was about. It was about collaboration. It was about building a team where we all work together. No one's above anyone, right? We're one unit and the unit does not function if a piece is missing.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
When you keep yourself grounded, the kind of growth you can have is amazing and you need to keep yourself open. I know this is my philosophy. This hasn't always been applicable in my life. I've had many times where I've let my ego get the better of me or many times where I felt like I had an edge on the market. And that kind of thinking, it doesn't get you where you need to be.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Just focus on keeping yourself grounded. Always be open to learning and never dismiss someone's opinion just because you believe you know more than them. You should be listening to everything. I don't care how much experience someone has. If they give me a take on the market that I haven't heard before, I'm excited to hear it every time, man. And that's my philosophy.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Minotaur is essentially an on-ramp for people who are looking to get consistency out of cryptocurrency markets when it comes to trading. Now, I conceptualized this idea 2015, 2016, only a couple years after I actually got into the space. I had the idea in my head, but I really wasn't certain how I was going to do it.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
So I had to build out a number of skills to be able to start to develop algorithms, which is something I was really excited about. But the big thing was mainly getting an understanding of how a manual trader will go into the market and try and trade.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Now, the things I realized when I did try to manually trade, one was that it's extremely difficult to do it and stay consistent for long periods of time. When your equities come from the environment I have, it's an overwhelming thing because it's the kind of thing where you can make $1,000 in a day if you make the right decision.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Our product development has always essentially been throwing live money into the market. We've funded everything ourselves from day one. We've never had a dollar of outside investment. We would start reprocessing that strategy on previously old Bitcoin data to see how it would perform in past markets. And what it would show us was these amazing, crazy results.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And that's a very overwhelming thing, I think, for a lot of people because they'll come into the market manually and maybe have a little bit of success early. But I really like to think of the market almost like the casino, right? The thing about the casino is they only have really a tiny amount of spread over you.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
But that little spread they have over you allows them to win almost always, as long as you stay in the casinos. So I really feel like the market is the same. You can have days where you do really well, but they've got a spread and edge over retail traders. And what will happen when you spend long enough in the market, it doesn't matter how much you make, you'll always give it back.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And I realized for a while, I was like, oh, is this just me? Maybe I'm not a good manual trader. But then I was very active in a lot of different communities. And I started realizing this pattern of manual traders constantly doing the same thing as me. Then I had an idea of building something that could give not only myself consistency, but consistency to all the other retail traders out there.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
My inception for Minotaur Trading Systems was always to put retail traders in a position where they can actually have consistency out of the market.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Now, what that actually looks like, I think a lot of people, including myself, thinks that when you figure out how to run automation in the market or you have success, it means it's going to look pretty all the time and you're always going to be in the green. And then you're going to wake up in a couple of weeks and be a millionaire.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
But it's like the harsh reality that the market is very similar to everything else. If you want to go and become a brain surgeon, you don't begin studying and then wake up qualified, right? And the market is no different, especially when it comes to investing.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
reality is things are going to take a long time and anything that really seems too good to be true nine times out of ten is going to be i want to focus on building something that could break down these traditional opinions that you can get really rich in cryptocurrency really fast because i really believe even though there's people that have done that for the vast majority of people that's just not the case minotaur trading systems is something that can give you consistency in a final financial market
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
It's not going to make you rich overnight. It's not going to give you all the wealth of your dreams. But if you run the system, what it will do is it will allow you to actually start to see returns out of a market in a scenario where most people can't. And that's a very powerful thing because once you have the ability to pull out passive income from there, you can do a lot with it.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
I essentially met Costa, who's the CEO of the business. Costa had come from a traditional finance background. He'd had a lot of success doing that. But we both saw, once again, this gap in the market. And I think I was the kind of guy who had really good ideas. I needed someone to back me and come in and put in some funding and start the company together.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
We met at a steakhouse, funnily enough, and we had a really long conversation about what we wanted to do and where we wanted to take this. And this always sticks with me because I remember Costa asking me, this idea is really good. Do you think this can be applied in the real world?
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Because so many people have so many good ideas, but it's such a different thing to taking a product to market and not only being able to sell it, but also delivering a result. Once Costa came in and began the funding, from there, the development of the initial strategy began. And it's pretty crazy looking back now because I'm not going to come here and say like our first version of the product.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And back then we were like, wow, we figured it out. This is it. Let's go live. We threw a few thousand dollars on it and see what it would do. And essentially, it lost all the money. So we were very humbled very quickly. My name is Sebastian Raffaeli. I'm the co-founder of Minotaur Trading Systems and the chief technology officer.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
was as good as it is now because there's quite a large gap disparity between where we are now and where the first version of the product was. And that was simply from us just learning as we go. So building that out, essentially what I had to do first was learn basic pine script coding for TradingView. So TradingView is a tool we've always used to develop our algorithms.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
It's a pretty popular charting software that will essentially allow you to go and chart candlestick data, historical data on a myriad of financial markets, not just cryptocurrency. You can do commodities, the lot. What it allows you to do is set alerts. And this is where I started getting an understanding of how we could implement automation into the strategy.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Because what TradingView does is it will allow you to set an alert on the chart. For example, let's say you've got a special technical indicator and you want to have a buy signal from it. You can set an alert and that alert will ping. You'll either get a text message on your phone or a vibration. And that will let you to know to essentially run to the computer and make a trade.
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
At the start, that's what we'd be doing. We'd be building out a manual strategy, trying to get then an understanding of how we can actually automate this. Now, once I figured out how to essentially automate the actual alert itself, going down the path of using webhook signals, what we found was that those alerts that I would
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S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
wake up at two in the morning and jump out of bed to try and make a trade, which is by the way, highly emotional. I don't ever recommend doing that, but we realized we can alert that, right? We can set a webhook signal on that alert, fire off the exact same trade to the exchange and have the exchange execute that for you. Now that really was the beginning.
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And that's where light bulbs started going off in my head because I knew for me and for the vast majority of people around me and statistics have shown the majority of traders are going to give it back because of things like that. We want to rush into the market as fast as we possibly can because it's such a market driven by news and driven by emotion.
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Everyone always feels like they're going to miss out. But inherently as humans, what we do every single time is we buy the top and sell the bottom. Most of us don't have the emotional capacity to ride out these waves. And there's nothing wrong with that. Emotion is something that's built into our DNA.
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And as I've gotten older and developed this system, I've really started to understand that it's not something you have total control over because you can't. Look at how many variables there are in your life on a day-to-day basis. Someone in your family gets sick, something happens with your partner or your wife. Sometimes you wake up in a bad mood, for God's sakes, and you're emotional, right?
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
So I think having this thesis that we can just come to the market and be robots, to me, didn't make any sense. And it was this combination of developing our algorithms on Pinescript, but then automating those signals through webhooks, where we actually built the first system that could buy and sell automatically within a given framework.
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
We had this strategy working really well and we even started to understand how to reprocess and use backtesting data. And TradingView has this funny knack of showing you a really good backtest.
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
So for example, to give you an idea of what this looks like, we would take that strategy and then what we would do is we would start reprocessing that strategy on previously old Bitcoin data to see how it would perform in past markets. And what it would show us was these amazing, crazy results. And back then we were like, wow, we figured it out. This is it. Let's go live.
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
We threw a few thousand dollars on it and see what it would do. And essentially it lost all the money. So we were very humbled very quickly and realized like, yes, this is working, but there's specific parameters in this that need to be adjusted. Our product development has always essentially been throwing live money into the market. We've funded everything ourselves from day one.
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
We've never had a dollar of outside investment. And what we quickly realized is just because something looks good in the past is not going to translate into results moving forward. So we had to identify a few inherent issues. I would say the biggest one we identified, as good as TradingView is, I'll give it the biggest wrap in the world. I think everyone should be using it.
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
It's an amazing software. But there's inherent issues with their backtesting system that does not allow you to see things clearly. Two of them, to give you an example, is simply liquidity in the market. And also the actual indicators themselves and the historical data is not 100% accurate due to the way that candles open and close. So from there, we had to start our first hire.
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And essentially, we had to hire a developer who understood how to write code in Python, because I definitely didn't. And we also had to hire a developer who understood a deep amount of knowledge on Pinescript. From there, we got him to build us our own in-house reprocessing system, a backtesting system, and added these functions that TradingView was missing.
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
This is when the light bulb moment happened, because we reran that strategy that looked really good on TradingView in our backtesting system, and it was basically losing all the time. So even though that was humbling and it was frustrating, we knew we actually had a vehicle here to start reprocessing accurate data and start to get the system to where it needed to be.
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
Now, from there, essentially, we started going deep on research because we saw this product had the ability to work. But the problem with the market is it's dynamic. It's not static, right? So the market goes up, the market goes down, and the market goes sideways. So our initial version could make money in very specific conditions of the market.
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
But when the market would change, it would start to struggle. What we actually did to start to get it to be able to flow with the market like it does now, we had to go deep into quantitative maths and essentially build a model based on math that could accurately trade the market.
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
And then we had to essentially reprocess over and over again and start to find patterns in the market and slowly adapt and apply like that. Within, to be honest, a few months, we had something that was working very well. But where it is now compared to back then is just crazy. Even while we were just at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville in the last week, we made so much progress and innovation.
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
When you're building trading strategies, very similar in a lot of ways to the tech world, like you can't ever stop developing. You never stop building. And the second that you think you've figured it out or the second that you think you've got this huge edge on, the market will humble you very quickly. So it is a thing where the development never stops.
Code Story
S10 E5: Sebastian Raffaele, Minotaur Trading Systems
But that's essentially how we took it from the point where it would lose money all the time to be in a position where it can be consistently profitable. And it was through reprocessing of data, but also using real money in the market. If you're around playing on demo accounts and playing around on the exchanges with demo funds, this is okay.