ANTHONY TRZECIAK | Dialect

Dialect is a web based application that analyzes financial market data and allows users to ask market data questions and receive answers in seconds.

Tony is a combat paralyzed veteran who served in The Marines from 2008 through 2012. He continues to use the leadership skills gained from the Marine’s as an advocate for active members and in the veteran support community. He has spent several years trading and studying the markets, Like most retail traders he has faced many highs and many lows. He wanted a way to make informed and actionable decisions, quickly and easily. Dialect’s mission is to make data navigation accessible and possible for investors who have historically been overlooked and underserved. And to bridge the gap between humans and artificial intelligence.

TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS AFTER THIS BRIEF MESSAGE

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hi and welcome back to Stocks for Beginners. I'm Phil Muscatello. We're presented with a matrix of confusing and endless data about stocks and markets every moment of the day. It's confusing for beginners. But what if you could talk to your device and get the data you need for investing, using your own natural language? My guest today is bringing that power to investors. Hello, Tony,

Anthony (55s):

How are you doing Phil?

Phil (56s):

Anthony Trzeciak is the CEO of a FinTech start up called Dialect. It's a web-based application that analyzes financial market data and allows users to ask market data questions and receive answers in seconds. So Tony, please tell us your backstory about how you came to this point in your life.

Anthony (1m 14s):

Well, I'm originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I joined the Marine Corps in 2008. I fought for the United States in Afghanistan and I was injured in war. I got blown up by an IED and my injuries from war, I ultimately ended up paralyzed. I spent several years in the hospital bed, watching TV, reading books, and I got an interest in the markets. When I started with my recovery and I ended up back home, I started day trading and I started my journey from there.

Phil (1m 48s):

So, you had no interest in markets at all beforehand, even when you say you were on deployment or on training or even previous to that? None whatsoever.

Anthony (1m 57s):

So, I had an interest in it. I just didn't have the time to actually trade and look through all the market data and everything like that because I was constantly training or I was deployed overseas and not everyone has the time for that, especially in the infantry. But you know, during times of war, you're more or less focused on training and getting ready for your deployments than you are sitting around in the rear and looking on the computer.

Phil (2m 22s):

Yeah, it definitely wouldn't be the thing that would be uppermost in your mind. This may be a sensitive question, but did it help you having something to concentrate on to help in your recovery?

Anthony (2m 33s):

So that's actually why I started trading. 'Cause I suffered some severe PTSD and depression. And sitting in a wheelchair all day, I didn't have much to focus my energy and my time on. So, I started getting an interest in the market, I started studying, I started trading and that ultimately led me to creating Dialect.

Phil (2m 55s):

Did you find it easy to start into day trading and what were some of mistakes that you've made? I mean, most people would be maybe taking a more cautious approach to investing, but you jumped in boots and all straightaway for trading, day trading?

Anthony (3m 9s):

Well to go on a little bit about how I got into trading a little bit more, I did get into some money from my injuries from my time in Afghanistan. Now I did consult other individuals who are much more knowledgeable about the market before I started trading. I did the smart thing. Most of my money, you know, I talked to a financial advisor and I started investing a compounding my money in index funds. So, I like to play the long-term game as that's safer. So, I like to, you know, not lose the money as day trading, especially in the beginning, you lose a lot and you learn from your mistakes. So, to avoid blowing up and losing all my money, I did go the safer route and I compound my money every single month with my wealth advisors at Merrill Lynch.

Anthony (3m 55s):

And you know, every time I have excess funds, I compound my money into index funds. But I do like to take higher risks as higher risk, typically you get higher rewards if you're doing it right. So, I took a small percentage of my money that I ended up getting from my injuries and I started day trading. And, you know, in the beginning I was losing quite a bit. I lost a lot of trades early on. I was hopping around from trading community to trade a community, trying to find what everyone calls their edge. And I noticed that you'd have to navigate and look at tons of data points to really find the proper trades or investments.

Anthony (4m 34s):

And there's just truly no way the human mind can process thousands of data points and seconds to ultimately make a decision on if it's a good trade or an investment. So, one day I was sitting in my backyard. I was trying to figure out how I can access loads of information seamlessly, easy and to make data driven or informed decisions with my money. And I picked up my iPhone, I started asking Alexa, or Siri and Alexa, you know, if you have an Amazon Alexa box, questions pertaining to the trade data, you know, sentiment, large equity trades, options trades technical analysis and I wasn't getting anything back.

Anthony (5m 15s):

I was getting, "we can't give you stock tips" or Siri and Alexa would give me some type of article that was posted. But how does that help me? I'm getting some biased opinion from somebody writing an article. I don't know, you know, really what their intentions are when writing that article. So, I wanted to figure out a way that I can access large amounts of data quickly to make informed decisions. And I ended up ultimately meeting Kelly, who's the CEO of Chata, www.chata.ai, C H A T A. And they're a natural language conversational company. So essentially what they do is they train language around databases so their end users can easily communicate with the database.

Anthony (6m 1s):

So, I presented him to this idea of like the data is available, there's distributors all over the world from, you know, NYSE, CBO, third-party distributors, you can get a direct feed from Opera. I mean, there's plenty of retail platforms out there that offer some type of options flow or trade flow, something for you to analyze. And then you have your brokers like TD Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, you know, there's plenty of brokers out there. But you know, it's just the ability to buy and sell things and look at data but there's so much trading going on. There’s millions of traits throughout the day, you know, and you want to zero in, you want to identify potential bullish/bearish setups, you want to follow large institutional buying, you want to see what they're doing.

Anthony (6m 46s):

There's just no way you can easily do that because there's just so much information overload on these websites, on these brokers. So, I presented this idea to Chata and what we have done is we're using natural language conversational AI and we're enabling people to communicate with our database so they could seamlessly just navigate through thousands of trades by using our native way of speaking. And you can literally just ask a question like you're talking to a human and get your answers in seconds.

Phil (7m 14s):

Let's go back to when you were first starting out, because obviously there's going to be a point where you didn't even know what questions that were relevant to ask in these situations. What kind of trading were you doing? What was the kind of information that you are looking for that finally evolved into the questions that you really wanted to ask?

Anthony (7m 33s):

So, I started off my journey, like I said a minute ago, going from trading community trading community, I've spent thousands and thousands of dollars joining pro rooms and in everyday people's rooms. I got an interest, especially in the options trading, I joined market rebellion, Jon and Pete Najarian, they're pretty popular. They have a segment on CNBC, "Unusual Options Activity". And you know, I was in that room, it cost me well over $10,000 for the year. And most everyday people, they don't even have that in their savings account, but they were the real deal. They really opened my eyes to a world that I never thought existed.

Anthony (8m 17s):

So, I wanted to figure out how they were doing that, how other individuals were identifying these large opposites trades or equity trades. And ultimately, you know, it led me to building Dialect. But I've jumped from hundreds of rooms. I mean, trading communities are growing rapidly, retail trading is growing substantially day by day. There's discord, there's Twitter. People are looking for answers on demand and most of the time, the people that are seeking help and advice are getting advice from non-licensed financial advisors. Most people don't even use their real names, they're given an alias, they're using some cartoon picture or, you know, some other image of somebody else.

Phil (8m 58s):

Using rocket emojis for their investing thesis.

Anthony (8m 59s):

Yes, sir. You know, and you're not really getting anywhere with that and you're not really learning from that. So, what's really powerful about our application is, is not only can you get access to all the same trade data that all these hedge funds and all of these institutional firms are using, you know, we learn from you. So, we learn how you're asking questions because it's based off machine learning so it's constantly rapidly evolving as people dynamically use the system, you ask questions, the algorithm responds with an answer and it learns from how you interact and ask these questions. So, it just becomes more and more robust as time goes on.

Phil (9m 42s):

Would you recommend that beginners take a very similar path to you that the biggest portfolio allocation should be mutual funds and ETFs, for example, but to only allocate a small proportion to learn about more high risk, high reward activities in the market?

Anthony (10m 1s):

Totally. I mean, gambling is very dangerous. And from my personal experience, it's a lot of ups and downs. You're going to get your heart broken a lot when you're day trading, regardless of what anybody tells you, from what my experience from the markets, you're going to learn the hard way. And if you go in all in with your hard-earned money, you have a chance of losing it at all. So, you always want to take the safer road no matter what. No matter what you do in life safe is always best. But it's hard when you see all these people posting these extraordinary gains of 10000%, 1000% on these options. And you're like, "Oh, if this guy can do that, I can do that too."

Anthony (10m 42s):

But they don't tell you a lot of the times, you know, it took them a long time to be able to identify these trade setups, analyzing technical analysis, analyzing order flow. You know, there's a lot that goes into it. So of course, for me, I went the safe route. 90% of all my funds goes to the safer route: index funds, ETFs. And I compound my money every single month. But then I always leave myself a little bit of side money. You know, if I see an opportunity that I believe that gives me a prime opportunity to make some money, I'll take that investment. I'll take that straight. I'll take that gamble. Because essentially that's what you're truly doing when you're day trading is you're taking a gamble, you know, for every winner, there's a loser.

Anthony (11m 22s):

And a lot of people don't like to highlight all the losers, but the highlight the big trades and they'll post it online and they'll suck you in in thinking that everything is, you know, all rainbows and, you know, you're just gonna win everything by just joining their discord community or their Twitter feed or their Slack or their Telegram. There's just so much noise out there. There's thousands of websites ultimately that is posting some type of stock market information, some type of order flow, some type of education.

Phil (11m 50s):

In its simplest form. An option trade might be a particular company's trading today at a hundred dollars and for a lower price, you're buying the option to buy that at $110, 120, $130. And the higher their price goes; the more is what's described as deep in the money. Is that the correct way of looking at it?

Anthony (12m 24s):

So, the correct way to look at a deep in the money option trade is to say, Tesla is trading at $900 and I'm seeing somebody place millions of dollars on deep in the money options on Tesla, so they're buying the $300 calls, the $400 calls, the $500 calls. So, they're not going to get affected when there's a sudden 10-point drop. You're not going to lose the premium as much as you would, if you were buying at the money or out the money. And that's my biggest problem without the money options contracts is most retail traders or investors are buying out the money contracts

Phil (12m 52s):

Because they're cheap

Anthony (12m 53s):

Exactly. So, it's essentially like betting. Whereas when you see these institutions or these large investment firms, they're most likely not buying out of the money contracts, they're buying very deep in the money contracts, or they're taking some type of spread to hedge against their equity position. So, it's important to be able to identify the types of trading that's going on. Because, I don't want to follow, you know, what the masses are following on social media, granted, you know, AMC, GameStop, you have all these, you know, retail stock names that go up and down violently because people are playing out of the money options on it. You know, I don't essentially like to take a gamble with my money that is that violent.

Anthony (13m 35s):

I would prefer to take something that is less risk and it gives me a higher probability of success. And, you know, if you stick to strict rules, you know, and you're disciplined with your money, you have a good chance of success through time. But you know, slow is smooth, smooth is fast, slow and steady wins the race. You know, when you go all in and you're trying to just win it all on one trade, that's why 95% of traders, they typically fail because they're taking such high gambles that has such a high success of failure that you should be identifying or trying to locate things that have a higher chance of success, but it might not pay the same amount as taken it at the money or out the money call, but you're minimizing your risk and trading spreads is another great way to minimize your risk.

Anthony (14m 27s):

Granted, it might not be a So, thousand percent gainer, but you're giving yourself the highest probability of success. And that's what truly matters at the end of the day.

Phil (14m 36s):

You mentioned order flow as well. Is that a way of following the smart money following that institutional money? Is that the point of following order flow?

Anthony (14m 45s):

That's the trend right now is everyone's typically following on social media is order flow from what I've seen. And I've been part of hundreds of rooms through discord, through Twitter, Slack, Telegram, everyone's looking at some type of order flow. And you don't truly know who is buying that set contract or those equity blocks. You know, there's a lot of misinformation out there when it comes to the data that's going on. A lot of the time people are promoting, "Oh, I have live data, I have delayed data." You know, live data is still on some type of a delay. You know, delayed data can be anywhere between 15 minutes to 30 minutes delayed. So, there's a lot of misinformation out there.

Anthony (19m 27s):

And again, my goal is to educate people on so they can learn. I would rather you learn from my hardships and my mistakes. So, you don't make those same mistakes yourself. You know, you should ask people, you know, their experiences on trading because it's very, very dangerous. And one mistake is all it takes and you can lose all your hard-earned money. So again, like the most important thing is to figure out how you can take probable risks. Essentially, you don't want to just gamble everything away. You want to take the highest percentage risk, you know, where you're going to not guarantee, but have the highest probability of success.

Anthony (16m 8s):

So that's why I like index funds and compound and my money on ETFs. And when I do trade for myself, I'm always looking at just strict criteria trades. And for what I like might not work for you, Phil, or might not work for Joe or John down the street or Amanda. But that's the beauty of this is that you can find anything that you believe is relative or important to take a good trade or an investment. And it's good to communicate with people and to learn from people because ultimately you want to learn from people's success and failures. So, you too can have the same success in your trading or your investment.

Phil (16m 45s):

You're a big believer that data allows you to deal with your emotions. What are some of the emotions that investors have to consider when they are starting to trade and invest?

Anthony (16m 57s):

Well, emotions are probably the biggest thing every trader and investor deals with. I've spoken to people who've been in this game 30 years and emotions are always the highest or the most dangerous thing. You are literally your worst enemy. You got to look yourself in the mirror and look at yourself and you're fighting against you, especially when it comes to trading. So, when you're sitting there and you're taking trades, because somebody's already up in the stocks already run up 10, 20%. And you're like, "Oh, I gotta hop in it now" it can keep going and boom, there goes your money, you know. And some people get lucky, but most people don't. And like I said, every winter, there's a loser.

Anthony (17m 37s):

So, emotions run high in trading and I've seen people who've been traders for years, decades, blow up accounts, lose million-dollar trades. I've literally watched people lose a million dollars on one trade. But I've also seen them make three, four or $5 million on a trade. So, you know, it's all about risk management and risk reward. And if you don't know how to conquer your emotions, trading is probably not for you because emotions run very high when you're taking a gamble with your money. So, it's just a word of caution.

Phil (18m 11s):

What's the most dangerous emotion that you've seen in your own personal experience?

Anthony (18m 15s):

Fear of missing out. We call it FOMO. You know, it's the FOMO fear of missing out when you're constantly seeing people make dramatic gains. You're like, "Oh, I want a piece of that." And this is my big issue with social media, is because when you go on Twitter and you go on all these other social media platforms, everyone's always pumping and promoting like massive trades. And everyone ultimately thinks that I can just go hop into these rooms and make this same success as they do. But they don't tell you about all the years or months that they've put into learning, you know, the proper setups, technical analysis, reading a chart, looking at volume, looking at price action. You know, there's a lot that goes into it.

Anthony (18m 59s):

And unless you educate yourself, trading is going to affect your mindset. And you'll get depressed, you'll get angry, you'll hate yourself. So, you know, word of caution from my experience is, I would take all the time in the world to study, to read books, watch YouTube videos. There's plenty of great information out there. There's plenty of people who give out free information. And another problem that I have with social media is that a lot of people charge for information and education. When a lot of these individuals don't even have the education or the proper knowledge themselves to be charging people for this information. So, it's very important that you're looking at who you're getting this information from and to find people who are giving you credible free information, so you can educate yourself.

Anthony (19m 41s):

And that's what really matters at the end of the day is to educate yourself because knowledge is power.

Phil (19m 50s):

Fantastic. People are tracking the large movements of say the S and P 500 or the NASDAQ going up and down every day, but it is possible to trade across all kinds of market conditions. Is that the case Tony?

Anthony (20m 2s):

I mean, you can trade in any market condition. I mean, if we're in a downtrend, I mean, you can take puts on the market and you can make money as the market goes down. I mean, if it's an uptrend, you can make money while the markets go up. And this also goes to show, you know, as I was saying earlier, trading spreads is a great way to minimize your risk. And again, but you have to educate yourself. Most people don't even know what a spread is or what proper spreads to take in certain environments. And that's where education is very important. So, if you're looking to take a trade or an investment on your own without a financial advisor, you need to make sure that you're educated on what are the best probable outcomes when you're taking a trade pertaining to spreads or if you're going make it on the options. Because like I said, if you're trading, it's the wild, wild west out there, it's very dangerous.

Phil (20m 49s):

Can you describe what a spread is?

Anthony (20m 51s):

I mean, depending on the spread that you're talking about, there's iron condors, there's bull call spreads, there's put spreads, you know, there's quite a few spreads. You know, we could talk for a long period of time on every single spread.

Phil (21m 4s):

What's the simplest spread?

Anthony (21m 5s):

Ultimately, you know, you can take a bull call spread, you know, you can buy a call and sell a put and you can collect the premium from that. Ultimately, you know, the safest investment is going to be probably buying an individual stock or index fund or ETF and then you can sell out of the money calls against it. I believe they call it a poor man's call or a poor man's covered call, I believe. But you know, there's a lot of option strategies out there. And again, my goal is to train a language model to identify what people need to learn, to make the best sound decision with their money.

Phil (21m 40s):

You must have at your fingertips, a lot of information that the AI algorithms delivering to you with Dialect, what are some of the most common queries that investors and traders are asking?

Anthony (21m 52s):

Well, what's great is that you can ask a wide variety of questions pertaining to order flow, technical analysis, options and equity. Most people are more or less interested in what's going on in the dark pool, what's happening pre-market and aftermarket. So, a lot of people ask, you know, what, what is the largest dark pool prints taken?

Phil (22m 11s):

What is the dark pool?

Anthony (22m 13s):

Dark pool prints are large prints that happen before and after market hours, large equity buying. And a lot of people seem to be interested in on that.

Phil (22m 22s):

Who's doing that?

Anthony (22m 24s):

You'll truly never know who exactly are those individuals buying those shares. You'll just see massive prints. So, you'll never truly know who exactly is buying it unless they're some type of insider and there buying large amounts where they have to disclose that they purchased that. You can look through the sec.gov and see insider filings. And it's something that Dialect will have in the near future is be able to identify insider movements by just simply asking a question like, was there an insider buys on, you know, Microsoft or Disney or Nvidia or AMD. It'll dynamically tell you what insiders are purchasing that. But they don't have to disclose that right away. So, you truly don't know who was buying those large dark pool prints.

Anthony (23m 9s):

And another common query, especially with options, is people just simply just ask, what was the largest bullish trade on the market today? What was the most bearish trade taken? And the money trades taken. Was there any large out the money? Is there anything unusual options activity? You know, meaning that a higher-than-average normal volume on a set stock, because every options trades a certain average amount every single day, but then when you see a large uptick in volume, especially in one or several prints rapidly, that's very unusual. So that's another thing that a lot of people have interest in, is to see unusual buys and options or equity markets that you can easily identify yourself using Dialect by simply asking a question and also dynamically alerting, you can create your own alerts pertaining to that.

Anthony (23m 55s):

So, if you want to know any single time any criteria happens, instead of staring at your computer and just waiting for the trade to happen, you can just dynamically create any alert. Just notify me anytime, any deep in the money options trades taken over X amount of volume over X amount of premium. And anytime that happens, you're notified. Do you want to be notified anytime there's a new opening trade over and open interest over X amount, volume, X amount of premium? It can be notified. And that's the beauty of it is that you can dynamically set any alert, anything that you find relative important to take a trader or investment, you can dynamically set that alert and our application.

Phil (24m 32s):

Okay Tony, tell us a little bit more about Dialect. What would you like listeners to know about?

Anthony (24m 40s):

Well, using Dialect, you can dynamically create any dashboard that you want. So, meaning that you can come in and create your own terminal, you know, you can query and filter out any trade data. So, when you go to your dashboard, you're going to have the data that you want. We have presets for you that you can just use our presets that we created. There's preset alerts, or you can create your own alerts. You know, my goal with Dialect is to give everyone seamless, easy access to data and that you could just easily query anything you want. And my goal was to learn from people as well. As I want to learn how you're going to ask these questions. I want to learn how you're going to use our application because with machine learning it's just going to rapidly evolve with the end user base.

Anthony (25m 23s):

So, it's really, really powerful. And there's a lot of systems out there that are just a copycat of one another and they're not truly giving you any unique experience. Dialect enables you to get your own unique experience, ask your questions and get the answers. And we have a lot of technology with Chata that's in the works right now. There's going to be some really cool features coming out in the future. And education, like I said before, is probably the most important thing to me. So, one of the things that we're working on is going to be able to answer people's questions pertaining to education. And that just comes with it. You know, we're not going to sit there and charge a trading course and what all these other people are doing.

Anthony (26m 3s):

Knowledge should be free, in my opinion. You should have access to information. You know, when you go to Google and you type in a question, you're going to get thousands of links. You don't know what's credible or not. And what's really powerful about Dialect is we find the credible information and we can train a language model around it and you can ask the questions, get the answers and then you get the source code, the website link, click it and you get jumped right to that source or that website where that information is coming from. So, you know, the information, what we're getting as credible. And that's important because you want to make sure that you're educating your user base, they're getting credible data. We get our data currently from the CBOE. But like I said, we could take any database and train this language model around that database so that anyone's end users can dynamically communicate and query any data sets that they find relevant or important.

Phil (26m 55s):

And any links that you can share with listeners?

Anthony (27m 0s):

Yeah. If you go to www.Dialect.app, D I A L E C T and just check it out, we have a free seven-day trial. If you reach out to us, you can contact us through our website and just tell us that you were listening to Phillip's podcast and we can give you a significant discount and, you know, help everyone out. And, you know, my goal is to help everyone get access to information at a low-cost point, you know, stock market data is relatively expensive. And our goal is to enable everyone to get access to this data at a price point that they can afford. You know, so if you're interested in getting an extended free trial over a week, you know, just contact us, we're willing to help anyone out. And again, we're learning from you and we're constantly evolving our application to better meet the needs of everyday retail, investors and traders.

Phil (27m 49s):

Do you have any testimonials from users or any people that have got some value out of what you're offering?

Anthony (27m 55s):

We do. We have a few. We launched about three and a half weeks ago. Our user base is growing, but it's a very crowded market. There's a lot of noise out there. So, we are looking for strategic partnerships. We're looking for affiliates. You know, we're looking for people who would like to join our team and to, you know, grow with us. You know, and again, this is made by traders for traders. So, you know, we're willing to work with everyone to make a more dynamic, more robust application and to give everyone a great experience. And we want to learn from you: we take questions, we take comments, we take concerns, even criticism, bad criticism is good. We learn, you know, the good and the bad on what the application can do, what the algorithm can do.

Anthony (28m 36s):

And we learned from people. You know, if people want to see certain data sets trained, just reach out to us and we can train a language model around anything that you find relative or important.

Phil (28m 44s):

Anthony Trzeciak, thank you very much for joining us today.

Anthony (28m 46s):

Thank you, Phil. You have a great day.

Phil (28m 49s):

If you found this podcast helpful, please tell a friend. Especially if it's someone who needs to start thinking about investing for their future. You'll be helping them and helping me to keep this show on the road.

Stocks for Beginners is for information and educational purposes only. It isn’t financial advice, and you shouldn’t buy or sell any investments based on what you’ve heard here. Any opinion or commentary is the view of the speaker only not Stocks for Beginners. This podcast doesn’t replace professional advice regarding your personal financial needs, circumstances or current situation.