Today we’d like to introduce you to Austin Starks
Hi Austin, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I started trading during my junior year at Cornell University. Every day, I would wake up before the market opened with ideas about which stocks I wanted to buy or sell. I’d open the Robinhood app and execute my trades. However, this manual process was challenging – often, I would miss out on trades simply because I was too slow to execute them on the platform.
I started looking for automated trading platforms, but I couldn’t find many options. The ones I did find were either incredibly difficult to use (requiring advanced coding expertise) or didn’t have the functionality I needed. So, I began tinkering with my own scripts and small apps – nothing too complicated at first, but it sparked something in me.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I was pursuing my MS in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, the best school for software engineering and artificial intelligence in the world, according to US News and World Report. My first class was Foundations of Software Engineering, where we learned how to build high-quality software systems in teams. While completing my homework for this class, I had the idea to start building my own trading platform. In fact, I essentially did the homework twice – once for my class project and once for what would eventually become NexusTrade.
Over time, I continued iterating and improving the system, and finally, NexusTrade was born.
The idea to integrate AI into NexusTrade came to me last year. While I had taken AI courses at both Cornell and Carnegie Mellon, it wasn’t until my day job at Oscar Health that I seriously considered incorporating AI into the platform. At Oscar, I participated in an AI-themed hackathon, where I led a team of six people, including designers, data scientists, and software engineers. We built a tool that automated contract configuration for the company, and we ended up winning the Leader’s Choice award.
That experience opened my eyes to the power of large language models (LLMs) for automating complex tasks. I started incorporating AI into NexusTrade, beginning with the configuration of algorithmic trading strategies and expanding into tools that help with fundamental analysis and financial research.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not at all.
My first attempt at building the platform failed. The system I created was slow, rigid, and ultimately couldn’t deliver on my vision of enabling users to build any trading strategy imaginable. After struggling with it for a while, I decided to give up. I open-sourced the project on GitHub, published a Medium article about it, and took a break.
That article gained a little bit of traction, which gave me the motivation to give it another shot. I decided to rebuild everything from scratch.
In the second iteration, I made the platform lightning-fast and fully customizable, allowing users to configure virtually any trading idea within it. But even after these improvements, it wasn’t easy.
For a long time, I struggled to acquire users. Most people didn’t understand the concept or how powerful the platform was. Despite my best efforts on social media and writing articles on Medium, I was only gaining a handful of users each day—less than 10 on some days.
It was frustrating, and there was a point where I decided to build it mainly for myself as a learning experience since it seemed like no one really cared.
However, things started to change recently. My articles on Medium began resonating with more people, and the platform’s value became clearer. Organic traffic started to grow.
Between January 1st, 2023, and January 1st, 2024, I grew from just 1 user (myself) to 2,319. By August 1st, 2024, that number had climbed to 5,571. Now, just three months later, I’ve reached 9,622 users. People are joining organically, and starting this month, the platform is profitable.
We’ve been impressed with StarksTech LLC, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
My name is Austin Starks, and I’m the founder of StarksTech LLC, named after my favorite superhero, Iron Man (Tony Stark). I wanted my business name to reflect that inspiration.
My platform, NexusTrade, is an AI-powered automated investing platform that provides retail investors with access to Wall Street-grade trading tools. NexusTrade offers a comprehensive suite of features designed to help users develop, test, optimize, and deploy their investing strategies with ease. It also simplifies and streamlines financial research, making it more accessible for everyday investors.
What truly sets NexusTrade apart is our full embrace of AI. I don’t view AI as just a trendy buzzword to attract funding; I genuinely believe it has the power to revolutionize how we approach financial markets. By harnessing AI, we’ve made complex tasks like algorithmic trading and financial research far more accessible to retail investors. Those who are embracing this technology are finding themselves much more profitable in their trading and investing than those who are not.
Unlike direct competitors like Composer, which lacks many essential features, NexusTrade enables investors to create virtually any trading strategy they can imagine. It also includes tools that help users perform in-depth financial research, empowering them to make smarter, data-driven investing decisions. While platforms like TradingView focus on chart patterns, NexusTrade encourages a hypothesis-driven approach, allowing users to create and evaluate their ideas quickly and effectively.
Traditional brokerages may offer some competition, but NexusTrade provides advanced tools that no standard brokerage offers to retail investors. Soon, we’ll be integrating with brokerages, starting with Alpaca and later expanding to Interactive Brokers (IB).
What I’m most proud of is that I’ve built NexusTrade entirely by myself—it’s nearly 100,000 lines of code, fully functional, and impressive enough that even people in the financial industry, including those on Wall Street, are amazed by its advanced capabilities.
The platform is free to try, and when you’re ready to upgrade, it costs less than a Netflix subscription.
What do you like and dislike about the city?
I absolutely love Atlanta. The food here is fantastic, and the weather is great year-round. We don’t have to worry about major natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, or earthquakes, and when it does snow, it melts within a couple of days. Plus, there’s always something fun to do in the city.
On the flip side, one thing I dislike about Atlanta is the dating scene. In my experience, many of the women I’ve dated here expect you to impress them before even taking the time to get to know you. I’ve dated in other cities like San Francisco, Ithaca, and New York City, and it felt much more balanced and egalitarian there. It wasn’t as difficult to make connections without feeling like you had to move mountains just to get started.
Pricing:
- Free. Includes unlimited backtesting, 1 portfolio, 10 strategies, 20 stocks in your watchlist, and a daily market report for 5 stocks per day
- Starter Pack ($199.99/year, $19.99/month, or $1.99/day). Everything in free plus 8 strategy optimizations per day, 100 messages per day with the AI, View 500 Detailed Stock Reports, 50 portfolios, 30 strategies per portfolio, 250 stocks in your watchlist, and a daily market report for 25 stocks per day
- Financial Genius ($599.99/year or $29.99/week). Everything in free plus 16 strategy optimizations per day, 300 messages per day with the AI, View 2000 Detailed Stock Reports, 100 portfolios, 100 strategies per portfolio, 10000 stocks in your watchlist, and a daily market report for 50 stocks per day, priority customer support, priority feature requests, priority bug fixes
- Wall Street Elite ($1199.99/year or $49.99/week). Everything in free plus 32 strategy optimizations per day, 600 messages per day with the AI, View 10000 Detailed Stock Reports, 1000 portfolios, 250 strategies per portfolio, 25000 stocks in your watchlist, and a daily market report for 100 stocks per day, priority customer support, priority feature requests, priority bug fixes
- You can also buy “research tokens” if you don’t want to purchase a subscription
Contact Info:
- Website: https://nexustrade.io/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/starkstechnology/
- Twitter: https://x.com/nexustrade_
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@StarksTech
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/show/6xX8sT3sD7sYFaD8EH5PaV
