joshdance

Just found this super interesting project called Aries Engine. They're pitching themselves as the Unity/Unreal of fintech, which caught my attention. The idea makes sense - before Unreal, game devs would burn cash just building physics engines before touching actual gameplay. Similarly, fintech startups often die dealing with:

Regulatory compliance Market data fees Infrastructure/broker-dealer setup They just got SEC and FINRA (FINRA stands for Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. It's a private, non-governmental organization that regulates the U.S. securities industry) approval and are launching an open development platform that supposedly handles a lot of this. They have built two reference apps they're open-sourcing:

An infinite canvas trading platform (widgets + TradingView/Discord integration) Mobile trading app Tech stack includes the usual suspects: commission-free trading APIs, options chain data, real-time feeds, etc. Team apparently built APIs for major brokerages before.

They have 16k+ MVP users. Planning futures/commodities and international. Crypto exchange in the works too (whitepaper available).

FINRA check: https://brokercheck.finra.org/firm/summary/330235

Anyone here tried building fintech products before? Curious how significant this could be. The FINRA approval seems legit, but interested in hearing takes from people who've dealt with these infrastructure problems firsthand.

Tweets talking about it.

https://x.com/Aries/status/1892281286301020671

https://x.com/DeItaone/status/1892280491111293355

Thoughts?

AngelList, Product Hunt, Craigslist come to mind. What are others?

If you wanted to create a niche site (articles monetize with ads or affiliate links) what platform are you building it on in 2023?

Wordpress is probably the default.

Webflow is new but their blogging interface is frankly bad.

Ghost is an option but has less plugins that Wordpress.

What would you choose?

One wrinkle is that we want to include custom coded pages (calculators, interactive examples) as well. Any CMS systems play well easily with custom code?

Been looking for advice on which type of IRA to chose from, as I don't have access to a 401k.

Most advice is 'if you will be in the same or lower tax bracket during retirement, chose Traditional, otherwise Roth.

Which sort of sounds like 'if you can predict the future, choose x'

But did more research and it seems like everyone should chose Roth IRA. 4 reasons why.

1. Unless you’re an extremely disciplined saver and calculate how much money you saved on taxes with a Traditional IRA and invest that in a different account, you will , end up with more after tax money in retirement with a Roth IRA.

2. If you continue to increase your income, eventually you won't be able to invest in a Roth. If you are single making over $140,000, you can't invest.

3. Early withdrawal rules are much more flexible with a Roth. There are ways you can get out your contributions before 59 years old without paying a penalty.

4. The Roth accounts have fewer restrictions for retired people. Traditional IRAs accounts require you to start taking money out at 72. With a Roth you don't have to.

When preparing a campaign you always worry about your own site. You worry 'Will it be able to handle the visitors' etc.

A reminder to worry about your partners sites as well.

We launched a crowdfunding campaign at 7am ET today, and the partner site goes down.

https://republic.co/bucket-list