Demystifying Wall Street.
OVERVIEW / The type of trading executed on Wall Street is (surprise!) exclusively performed on Wall Street trading floors. As a result, prospective traders have no way to practice before they head to the Street. Moreover, women, minorities, and people from low-income backgrounds have fewer opportunities to acquaint themselves to these trading floor practices, which could lead to poorer on-the-job performance. Building Block Trade addresses this knowledge gap by letting budding traders practice trade execution so they’re ready for the job.
PROJECT DETAILS / Spring 2020 visual and UX designer
with John McCambridge, Sonal Butala, Archita Harathi, Drew Schneider, Ian Hou
for Peter and Nick Pellet, D-Trade founders and trader extraordinaires
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RESEARCH
Students and junior traders have no way to practice trade execution until they go to the Street.
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS / As part of our research, we became full-time members of the D-Trade student club at Dartmouth, which attempts to simulate Wall Street Trading on Excel.
There is a crowded market of trading platforms that allow the everyday person to begin trading in real-time markets. For instance, Robinhood boasts a beautiful user interface to help novice and experienced traders alike make live transactions. However, these platforms fail to deliver a key tenant of Wall Street trading —trade execution. Execution includes transaction mechanics and Over-the-Counter (OTC) trading, which are the crux of a Wall Street trader’s day. Currently, the only platforms that exist to fill this niche (e.g. Trading Technologies) synchronize with real-time markets, which pollute the art of execution with research and preconceived notions about hyped-up securities. By creating isolated markets with customizable volatility, Building Block Trade offers a unique execution-focused learning platform that will be invaluable to aspiring traders.
Building Block Trade will ultimately be pitched to banks with structured sales and trading (S&T) internships. Our clients asked us to design a robust analytics platform in addition to the simulated trading platform for employers to observe and assess the trading styles of their intern classes in addition to the core trading platform.
USER INTERVIEWS & PERSONAS / As a team, we interviewed ten students with various trading experience (most of whom were D-Trade members).
To help us consolidate our thoughts and empathize with our users, I drew the user personas below.
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IDEATION
As a three-person design team, we divided the work. Archita worked on administrator analytics, Drew worked on product marketing (landing page and logos), and I designed the core trading platform.
My user flow for the equities platform:
SKETCHES: Following our user interviews and research I sketched out my initial thoughts for the equities trading platform. I wanted to maintain the feel of the spreadsheet systems used on Wall Street, while also giving it a modern edge to appeal to commercialization and new users. I based the user functionality and navigation within the equity platform on existing spreadsheet systems given to us by our clients.
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ITERATION
Users are actually trading with the site, while admins are Wall Street managers using the platform to train interns or the partners themselves. The very distinct needs of both groups led us to construct entirely different portals for the website.
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FINAL PRODUCT
USER DASHBOARD / The User Dashboard allows users to see all of their markets in one place and which markets are open and closed. Users can click into a certain market for detailed options and trading or join a new market.
LEADERBOARD / The User Leaderboard lets users view their trading activity against other users for each market. Users can sort the ranked leaderboard by the risk they took on, total profit/loss, and volume of trades conducted.
EQUITIES PLATFORM / The equities platform consists of three core components: the heat map, the single-equity CLOB (central limit order book), and the equities trade book.
The Equities Heatmap is the first screen users see when they initially click into a certain market. It provides users with a broad view of all the equities in the specific market that was selected. Users can see the trading price, graph, and best bid/ask for each equity on the heatmap. The right-hand pane remains for all pages in the market, showing traders online and individual user portfolio positions. It can be minimized if needed. The left-hand pane lets the user navigate among pages in the market and is always shown.
The Single-Equity CLOB allows users to view detailed information for one equity and trade using the Central Limit Order Book. Users can enter their own bids and offers, and also hit/lift from existing ones. The page presents all the bids/asks sorted from best to worst and the candlestick graph can be manipulated for certain views.
The Equities Tradebook presents users with a tradebook for each equity, highlighting the shares owned and profit/loss for that specific security. Users can view all their buying and selling activity and book over-the-counter trades against specific counterparties. With the T-2 settlement system, trades are shown as pending until cleared in the system, unless an error is found.
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谢谢 !
A last thank you to every member of the incredible Building Block Trade team. I loved every minute of working with all of you!