Realize - Integrate your app or website with retail brokerages | Product Hunt

Hey everyone! I’m Sean, co-founder of Realize (https://www.realizefi.com/) along with Curtis & Tim.

*What is Realize?*

Realize is an API that connects apps or websites to retail brokerages so users can view real-time investing data and trade from their existing brokerage accounts. For example, a portfolio rebalancing app can use the Realize API to place trades in a user's Robinhood and TD Ameritrade accounts to keep their portfolio at target levels.

Our API automatically pulls a user's portfolio positions, order history, and historical performance at a minutely frequency. We also allow users to send orders to their brokerages.

We integrate directly with brokerages, which increases authentication success rates and allows us to produce more accurate data at a higher (minutely) frequency. We currently support Robinhood, TD Ameritrade, and Alpaca. We are in the process of adding other major brokerages.

*Why are we building this?*

We want to make it easy for developers to build better investing apps for retail investors. Initially we were building a social investing app - the app let users subscribe to other user’s portfolios and be alerted when they placed new trades. This use case isn’t really possible using existing APIs like Plaid/Yodlee. On Plaid/Yodlee, all investment data updates are capped at a daily frequency and account connections break frequently. We also wanted users to be able to copy trade, but Plaid/Yodlee don’t provide write access.

We then considered using an embedded brokerage solution like Alpaca. The problem there was that people who joined our app would have no access to their existing trading history and would have to open up another brokerage account. We talked to some friends who said they wouldn’t want to do that, especially with a brokerage they didn’t know of or trust.

As a result of this, we decided we would just build the API ourselves! Realize allows you to build a fully-functioning investing app on top of the brokerages that people already use.

*What can I build with this?*

With Realize, you can build almost any investing experience. Some examples from the companies we are working with are portfolio tracking tools, a beautiful brokerage UI that you can use with any brokerage account, social copy trading, and more.

We’d love to hear about your use case if you’re building in the investing space! Feel free to email me at [email protected] or grab a time here (https://calendly.com/realizefi).

Thanks for reading!