Anton Altement and Mathieu Hardy on OSOM Finance’s Autopilot

0:01i'm ash madison from event chain for investmentpitch media in the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have anton ultimate the co-founder and ceo and matthew hardy the chief product officer of awesome finance gentlemen welcome to the show and it's a pleasure to have you here today look thanks for having us ashton uh so i'm anton i'm i

0:20i'm the ceo and co-founder of awesome finance coming from traditional banking having spent 10 years at credit suisse as an investment banker in my previous life back in 2018 satellite moved into crypto and hadn't really looked back since and i'm i'm joined by matthew the co-founder he he comes from chemical industry out of all places was digitizing chemical plants in his

0:43previous life and likewise saw the light back in 2018 and uh has been enjoying the writing crypto that's great anton and thank you for that introduction now let's just dive right into the details could you start off with what are the main solutions that awesome finance is providing to the blockchain space right now uh sure well our app it really has

1:05i'd say four key things that it does it has the portfolio aggregation functionality so you can connect all your wallets exchanges into and see them in one place it has uh bitcoin eve buying cell functionality uh and then on the less commoditized things we have our own algorithmic trader called autopilot and uh we also have a a gift functionality which is not very popular

1:31over christmas where you know the whole non uh well the social the distance gift gifts are popular so giving bitcoins and autopilot was pretty hot so that's what we did that's great and yeah i was reading into the autopilot trading system you know the defy industry inside of ethereum polkadot and these in these main block chains right now has just gone

1:55exponentially crazy over 2020 and it seems like 2021 the trend is just continuing and you've created a product within this auto trader to vet defy projects and d5 tokens matthew maybe you can explain a little bit more on on how that process works yeah sure with pleasure uh so first clarification we don't just vet defy token we have all sorts of tokens in the autopilot

2:23btc thb and b and dot when it comes to vetting tokens we have a two-pronged approach so this first a qualitative look which is done by our team um the quality of the project regulatory certainty uh the underlying technology uh and so for that reason there are all sorts of tokens which we don't have we don't have anything that is backed uh by real world assets because we're

2:51looking for a crypto native uh project we've stayed away from uh privacy coins like monero and dash although they don't always like to be called that but we've seen a big regulatory move and a lot of them getting the listed and we don't want to be holding a back of illiquid token one day we had also decided to remove xrp uh end of december we don't have any

3:19stable coins but if you don't meet any of those exclusion criteria areas you can be integrated into the autopilot desirable list and then there's a second check that's done which is more on the quantitative approach uh where we look at relative market cap and relative volumes to make sure that those assets are big and liquid enough to be included and

3:46then once we have done that screening for example today we have about 42 uh coins which are in our addressable universe uh and then the autopilot makes its picks uh usually holding between eight and fourteen uh different tokens um as time goes and trades multiple times a day very interesting and now just so that i

4:13get a clear picture from the high level is it sort of like an index where i just say i have a hundred thousand dollars and i put it in and then the autopilot rebalances the portfolio daily or weekly or hourly into what it thinks is best so you go my dear first and i'll i'll jump in yeah uh so it's it's a bit more than a rebalancer because the rebalancer you would get it

4:40they give it the universe of token and it would just rebalance in between that so you tell it okay i want to stay at the 20 of each and it just make sure that all your winners go and fill the bucket of all your losers which for us isn't a very uh appealing proposition especially if you're not like where in traditional market that would make sense here things can move

5:01pretty fast and so you can have your winners fill in the buckets of your losers until you've lost all your money so in that sense it's not really a rebalancer and then it's not really an auto trader in the sense that you would set your strategy or follow someone else's because it's really a portfolio building algorithm so the the the comparison isn't an index

5:28also because index will tend to take uh uh top 20 or top 50 or top 100 but uh might cap some of them uh at arbitrary or somewhat arbitrary numbers but with us you really have the flexibility of having big positions in relatively small tokens uh as the portfolio manager the quant portfolio manager uh sees that as being good for

5:55diversification yeah so i think the general point is to kind of of the autopilot is to really cut the downward volatility so to make sure to create that of your code portfolio right like a smooth line uh north east so that way like it doesn't have the same kind of up and down swings the way you'd see in in in a single position uh but it's just it's a bit more than than

6:20just you know buying the market it's kind of a smart way of buying the market thanks for that both of you and now i was my next question it might relate to this anton is is what is the most unique or what's the competitive advantage of the autopilot compared to some of these other portfolios that are just rebalancers or their auto traders well i think a couple of things first is

6:46the team so i think we i i really think we have a strong group uh group of people behind it aside from ourselves there are quants from uh who come from uh various walks of life uh phd mathematicians so really guys who kind of know when i know their stuff when it comes to numbers and so there's a uh so that's that's that uh that's point number one point number two i think there is else

7:13uh we you know is the actual performance so the autopilot has been live since september 2019 and by the way we started the strategy by putting our own money and only in april 2020 did we start taking other people's money and when you look back and look at the track record it kind of it beats uh all the competing strategies it beats all the indices uh it doesn't

7:37always be bitcoin admittedly but equally there is a price to pay for diversification so if you carry a portfolio of assets you inevitably will be times when you lose relative to a to a single asset definitely yeah and i was going to ask about that diversification i saw on your site that you know that's sort of a a key standing is being diversified but

8:00you talked about matthew how it's you know having an index that's completely balanced across the board may not be the best because the winners are jumping into the losers and and so on or you know having the ability to have small cap coins that have a lot of you know a lot of weighting into your portfolio um can you just talk about your diversification strategy in terms of

8:23you know large caps versus small caps versus types of coins and and how you see that in the through the auto trader i sure can uh so the what the the autopilot cares about is uniquely only price data it doesn't care if it's a d5 token or uh blockchain token there's really there's no

8:51it doesn't care about the substance it's just looking to make sure that you are diversified when it comes to how correlated those assets are to one another and that's where we can see that it's doing a great job we have a ratio called the diversification ratio which we abbreviate for a d ratio which uh expresses the weighted average volatility of the portfolio instruments

9:18as a multiple of the overall volatility and if you look at something like bitcoin well the diversification ratio is obviously one because you only hold one asset and then if you look uh something like uh the top 20 uh that you can find uh uh on crypto 20 uh the diversification ratio is uh 1.2 because you do hold 20 assets but because they're the biggest ones that

9:45people trade the most their correlation is really high and then if you look at something like the s p 500 which is also kind of all big companies lumped together uh there you have a diversification ratio of 1.7 and for us on the autopilot we have a diversification ratio of 2.2 so it means that the assets you're holding with us in the autopilot are very diversified which is uh

10:14kind of what enables what anton was talking about the smooth curve where when everything takes a dive we still are holding assets which hopefully aren't yeah i mean let me give a couple of examples in march when airplane came down crashing or the ball was flat barely budged and then uh i think that that's kind of that that shows one fast specification the other side of it

10:39is and here here is our difference from just following an index or a market weighted index as well if you were in a in a market weighted index then in may in june your second largest holding would be ethereum because that's the second largest capitalization coin well for us it was a small coin called link which is was quite unknown at the time and then i

11:01think we also what happened to the chain link over or over june and july so it's it's a project that passed the quality test and based on quantitative analysis of its trading pattern the autopilot recognizer probably has more potential than eve at the time and so it was part of its universe so it had the freedom to to take a a position uh at a discretion we capped every

11:26position at 30 percent so you always have at least three assets in your in your portfolio but still i think that sort of discretion that kind of you know that gives the autopilot an edge versus an index strategy that's very interesting and yeah link exploded from was it four dollars or so i think it recently hit a high of 25 dollars and it seems like it's going to continue to go

11:48and so now this has a lot of people interested anton and i just want to go back to you know the requirements for a minute for people that are real this has really piqued their interest is there any requirements in terms of jurisdictions or amount of that you can invest or are there any limitations to who can get involved with awesome finance well so we really try and make it as uh

12:11widely available as possible so to that end we really lowered the the entry level as much as we could so currently it's uh 30 euros so that's kind of the uh that's the lowest amount you can put in the autopilot and that's fine uh so you can either just transfer uh btc or you can uh do a bank transfer you can do a a a card payment so there's uh there are three different ways in which

12:35you can which you can come in when it comes to jurisdiction again the the idea is to really be global but for the minute we cannot be in the us unfortunately uh for the regulatory reasons uh but i think when you think about the big jurisdictions i think u.s and mainland china sadly are the two places where we uh cannot be so as long as you don't live in any of those two places

12:58uh we'd be super happy to have you that's good to know and matthew you'd mentioned the delisting of xrp and avoiding privacy coins um are there are you constantly adding or removing coins like for example there's many d5 projects that are starting to come up but you know right now they're just startups that you know people are getting into and they may be

13:23future unicorns or they may be exit scams no one really knows is there a limitation on what kind of coins moving forward besides those ones you've already mentioned in terms of what can be in the autopilot yes so we do review the universe daily so every day for quality reasons or for uh market reasons like the market cap drops or the volumes

13:54aren't good enough anymore uh we add or remove the assets to the autopilot so and that's kind of uh where we see a lot of our added value because you were asking uh if you want a smartly diversified portfolio in crypto because the space is so active and because it's so hard to vet if you do it yourself it's maybe not a full-time job but it might get close

14:16enough whereas if you do it with us uh we we take care of all that vetting for you so we we don't take tiny tiny coins because you still need a relatively big market cap to be able to enter the universe but we don't wait until they're top four either so we try to strike that delicate balance between sufficient volumes and big enough market caps

14:43and yeah great so now you you know 2021 as we mentioned d5 looks like it's going to continue this trend what's in the roadmap for awesome finance you know the platform is live right now do you have plans for further releases and development updates throughout 2021 yeah so i mean there's a lot going on in the background uh what we are looking to to do is to

15:08kind of continue adding those crypto wealth manager strategies so we're looking at some of the more fixed income like products to be added so for the folks that don't necessarily want to have the kind of market exposure but i'd rather earn some some interest in some shape or form on the crypto we're looking to add a couple more market strategies so i think it really i

15:28mean what we wanna want awesome to become is this kind of a place where you come and manage your crypto world and so we'll be working towards that goal throughout 2021 or also i think integration with some of the d5 projects is definitely part and parcel of it i i think it's a bit too early to say with which ones but there's definitely a a number of d5

15:48projects which we're looking to integrate with that's great and if the viewers are looking to get involved follow along with these updates and start using awesome finance what's the best way for them to get involved awesome.finance is our website you can find all the uh well description there you can uh you can actually have the web app there you can find us in app stores awesome

16:11finance if they have any questions they can write either to support at austin then finance or directly to me ceo at awesome.finance so be happy to to answer any questions and welcome to the platform great anton matthew thank you so much for the time i will leave those links in the description box below for the viewers all the best with awesome finance in

16:322021 and let's follow up in the near future fantastic thanks very much justin thanks for having us