The start to the ditto.trade story began many decades ago, but in 2012 when Michael, Lance and Vladimir launched an online incubation platform for emerging managers called RAPA is when the story changed from being about individuals to one about a team of like minded trading executives becoming leaders in the industry of matching trading talent with capital.

We quickly raised $60+ million for our stable of traders and over the next 3yrs we learned and refined the art of quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing traders returns, incubating talent and building optimally weighted portfolios. This culminated with the sale of RAPA’s IP and the merging of our community with an up and coming USA based capital raising platform.

In 2016 Michael and Vladimir went on to launch another analytics and incubation platform called PsyQuation which they grew to a 100,000 plus community of traders with a successful incubation platform for traders. Michael and Vladimir sold PsyQuation in 2018 and continued working for the company for a further 3years until the end of June 2021.
On 15 November 2021; Michael, Lance and Vladimir reunite together with Vladislav a former head of operations at PsyQuation to launch Ditto Trade Pty Limited an investment and multi asset trading platform with a unique focus on copy trading, trading tools and trader incubation.

After a decade plus years of working together, the team are back and excited to bring their wealth of experience, expertise and passion to the investment and trading industry.
Clearly there is no shortage of platforms and brokerage offerings. The obvious question is what makes ditto special and why does the team feel confident that we can compete with more established brokers and their larger balance sheets?

Ditto is Unique in many Ways

The broker industry is notorious for being run by faceless people. Ditto is far from faceless we stand by what we say and do. Lead by Michael, you will battle to find someone more available to assist and help traders get ahead. Michael is first and foremost a trader and knows what it takes to make it as a professional trader, he is well backed up by a professional team of quants, businessmen and developers. There are not many CEO’s of brokerage businesses who are as close to the markets as can be attested by his daily newsletter, Pathways.

The idea of copy trading is certainly not new. The managed account industry is a $400 billion plus industry that has been operating for close to a century with professional traders trading on behalf of investors in their brokerage accounts.
Around 2008 innovators like Collective Two, Zulu Trade and Etoro, harnessing the fast pace of technological advancement in the online broking industry gave traders the ability to copy the trades of a trader on their platform via the click of a button.

There was no detailed analysis of the ability of the trader. There was no proper due diligence process. There was no negotiation between trader and investor. There was no lock-ins where investors would have to wait a month or a quarter to break managed account engagements. These retail focused copy trading platforms allowed and still allow investors to copy any trader they like for 1 trade or for as long as they want. These so called expert traders have often traded for only 1 or 2 months and are anything but expert. Welcome to the wild world of copy trading.

Unique Point 1 — Expertise

Michael Ph.D. (behavioural economics) and Vladimir Ph.D. (mathematics) have together analyzed 100’s of thousands traders returns and regard themselves as global experts in this area. Lance has been backing traders for more than 30 years. Together Michael, Vladimir and Lance sit on the Ditto Investment Committee with a combined experience of incubating and allocating $200+ million to more than 250 traders over their careers.

Unique Point 2 — Regulated

We all know that many in the industry know nothing or very little about the regulations relating to managing client funds. Ditto is licensed through Gleneagle Securities Pty Limited, its main shareholder, in Australia, Vanuatu and the Seychelles with more jurisdictions likely to be added in the near term. Gleneagle is a multi-disciplinary financial services company which offers a boutique and tailored service to suit the investment and trading needs of its Institutional, Corporate and High Net Worth clients.

Unique Point 3 — Talent Filters

Ditto will not let anyone join the platform as a Pro. For investors to copy Pro’s they will need to meet our strict criteria to demonstrate their trading ability provides investors with a high probability of future success and that someone from the Ditto Investment Committee has interviewed the trader. While this does not guarantee success it certainly provides an important extra layer of protection for investors, which most other platforms do not perform to our standards. The entire managed account industry is notorious for promoting traders who have recently performed well, playing on the psychological recency bias where people extrapolate recent performance into the future. Ditto tries to avoid this bias.

Unique Point 4 — Portfolio and Money Management

Providing a highly select group of Pro traders for our investors to copy is what we focus on in point 3. However, perhaps even more important is choosing which Pro to invest in, when to stop copying and how much to copy. We provide what we believe to be an optimal solution through our Ditto Smart Portfolio. Nobel Laurette Harry Markowitz wrote that the closest thing to a free lunch in finance is diversification. We therefore invest in all our Pro’s using the latest methods in quantitative finance to allocate optimally.

Unique Point 5 — Access to Institutional Talent

Most people who have invested with high quality trading talent will know that there are typically high minimum dollar investments. Usually $100k is a minimum investment sometimes $1m. By investing on the Ditto platform you gain access to talent that is typically reserved for the rich.

Unique Point 6 — Small Investments will not Prejudice you

Ditto allows an investment as small as $200 in a Pro or a Pro Smart Portfolio. Typically small accounts do not copy the Pro with the same risk for the smaller account due to the typical minimal lot size 0.01 (micro lot), this means small copy accounts are usually much riskier than the account they are copying. Ditto is able to overcome this hurdle by decimalising accounts to more than 8 digits to achieve relative size parity.

Unique Point 7 — Trading Tools that Really Help

We have spent decades trading. We know that there is no holy grail when it comes to trading. We do however know what tools are helpful to traders. We have subscribed to many costly services and built many models and tools over the years. We have taken our years of experience and the fact that we still trade actively and applied that knowledge to building tools that are useful to newbies and experts. We are not executives sitting removed from the action. Trading is trench warfare and we are in the trenches.

Unique Point 8 — Our Incubator “The Hub”

We realise that not everyone can be a Pro on the Ditto platform. For starters you need a track record of 2yrs and a Sharpe Ratio of 1+ so that already excludes 99% of all traders. To fill the gap we have designed a program that aims to accelerate a traders ability to manage more money and earn performance fees. The secret to this program is having “skin in the game” if you are prepared to back yourself and work within the risk parameters we set then we will back you. We see The Hub as the minor leagues and through our mentoring and development we hope to create a talent funnel into the major leagues our Pro ranks.

Unique Point 9 — a HUGE amount of Symbols to Trade

We have all the FX pairs, Commodities & Metals, World Stock Indices that our competitors have to offer plus more than 1,000 US and 300 Australian Stocks to trade. We also have a larger offering of Crypto than most brokers as well as 24/7 trading for this market.

Unique Point 10 — Speak Directly to Decision Makers

Ditto’s executives are all shareholders in the company and we don’t have layers of management so you are talking directly to decision makers. We don’t know everything but we are super keen to assist, learn and try things that our community wants.

Unique Point 11 — Building a True Community Portal

When we launched RAPA in 2012 we had in mind to build an amazingly interactive portal. Even back then we had a profile wall with social media feeds as well as a built in trade journal. With our 15 November launch we have not yet covered this aspect but I can assure you we want to build the greatest interactive community features into our portal that the industry has ever seen.
As you can hopefully see this is no ordinary investment and trading platform. We urge you to jump onboard and partner with us as we show you a smarter way to trade — just ditto it.

The Ditto Team.