Welcome to Building SledgeKey

When I turned thirteen, my grandpa gave me ten shares of Disney stock; he called his broker, ordered the physical stock certificate, and put it in a decorative frame. From then on, I was hooked on checking the price of Disney shares and trying to guess what would happen next. Years later, after college, I opened my first trading account... but my decision making process hadn't changed and I was still trading like a kid with a couple Disney shares.

During my time at MIT Sloan I became obsessed with trying to find an approach that was more than a guess. I spent countless hours dreaming up strategies, modeling portfolios, and backtesting. By the end of my program I had learned one thing: it can be really hard to wrangle data and write the test scripts to test a strategy (without spending thousands of dollars on pro tools and datasets). Once again, I returned to speculation and optimism to build my portfolio.

I was driving across the country after graduating to meet my wife and family in San Diego, when one night it hit me - I cannot be the only person who wants to make investment decisions based on more than a gut feeling.

That's where SledgeKey was born. The goal is simple: bring institutional-caliber insight to every investor. No coding. No costly terminals. No complexity.

I built SledgeKey from the ground up to give investors lightning fast screening, true point-in-time backtesting, and natural language portfolio building. It's Wall Street performance without the walls.

It's still early but this journey has already been the most rewarding professional experience of my life. My promise is to make this tool better every day, in pursuit of giving individual investors the edge they deserve.

This blog will document the journey and give you a look behind the curtain at my brawls with messy data, crash courses in application development, and the decisions behind building SledgeKey. If you want to be a part of changing who gets to win on Wall Street, you're in the right place.

—Aaron