Hoc-trade Uses AI to Help Investors Understand Themselves Better
In cryptocurrency circles, KOLs shout in trading groups: “This coin is going to fly!” Your heart races, your mind goes blank, and without any research, you immediately go ALL IN. The next day, however, the coin’s price plummets, costing you several months’ salary in just one day.
Of course, this isn’t you, because you might not be willing to admit that emotions are mixed into trading—perhaps it’s FOMO (fear of missing out), excitement, or simply a lack of rationality. Especially in the crypto investment field, where “a day in the crypto world equals ten years in the human realm,” the regret of “missing out” can be more detestable than a drop in asset value.
Jonas Schleypen, from Germany and now an entrepreneur in Taiwan, along with co-founder Tan Shengrong, has developed an AI system called “Hoc-Trade” that uses behavioral detection to help traders understand themselves and avoid emotional decision-making.
Hoc-Trade is a system that quantifies “emotions” and “behavior” patterns from trading data, establishing unique behavioral psychological profiles for each trader based on their personal performance and reactions. These psychological profiles assess users’ risk aversion, susceptibility to emotional behavior, and decision-making tendencies under stress, subsequently providing customized advice and feedback. For instance, when the system detects that a user is prone to revenge trading, it will clearly point out the impact of such behavior on performance and provide detailed trading examples for evidence.
Jonas states that Hoc-Trade does not tell users “when to buy or sell,” but rather helps them understand why they make certain trading decisions. The underlying AI training process combines a vast amount of historical trading data, external market and news information, behavioral finance theories, and known behavioral patterns from hundreds of thousands of traders. Through the integration and analysis of this data, the system not only depicts each user’s trading behavior but also further understands the actual impact of these behaviors on investment performance.
As the AI continues to learn the characteristics of individual traders and accumulate more user data, its overall behavior recognition and prediction capabilities will continually evolve over time.
Currently, foreign exchange platforms FP Markets, YaMarkets, and online stock trading platform XS.com are all clients of Hoc-Trade. Recently, the international cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX also announced its collaboration with Hoc-Trade, which is seen as a key milestone in entering the crypto market.
Co-founder of Hoc-Trade, Jonas Schleypen.
Why Do Exchanges and Investors Need Hoc-Trade?
In sharing his entrepreneurial motivation, Jonas candidly admits that he is an investment enthusiast. From forex to short-term contracts for difference trading, he has experienced both significant gains and losses. Ultimately, he discovered that what truly affects performance is not the strategy itself, but the emotions and poor decisions made at the moment.
As a result, he began recording each trade and his emotional state in Excel, later realizing that these emotions resonated with behavioral finance theories. “Initially, it was just a tool for my personal use, but it has now evolved into an algorithmic system analyzing over 400,000 traders and millions of trades.”
Hoc-Trade operates on a B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) model, collaborating with regular or cryptocurrency trading platforms to provide analytical tools to end traders.
Why would trading platforms be interested?
For exchanges, it is not just an educational or marketing tool but a system that enhances user retention. “The core KPI for exchanges is to retain traders, but emotional traders quickly incur losses and exit, no longer contributing to trading volume,” Jonas explains.
Through Hoc-Trade’s system, exchanges can effectively monitor user trading performance and provide personalized feedback and tracking reports. When traders see their blind spots and opportunities for improvement, it helps build trust and reliance on the exchange, further solidifying user loyalty and platform revenue.
Hoc-Trade can establish unique behavioral psychological profile analyses based on each trader’s personal performance and reactions.
Attracted by Taiwan’s “Talent Pool”
Regarding the decision to set up an office in Taiwan, Jonas jokingly cites personal reasons: “My wife is Taiwanese, and I was an exchange student at National Taiwan University in 2015, which is when I first got to know Taiwan.”
The other 50% of the reason is the density of talent among developers in Taiwan. Jonas explains that Hoc-Trade primarily needs engineers, and Taiwan possesses highly capable developers, making it the technical core team of Hoc-Trade based in Taipei.
As for Taiwan’s cryptocurrency regulations, Jonas is not worried, stating, “Our tool is essentially about protecting users and helping them avoid risky operations. I even believe that it may become part of compliance education in the future, such as requiring novices who wish to increase leverage to complete a behavioral assessment and basic education first.”
Any user participating in Web3 projects must confront cryptocurrency trading behavior. Jonas points out that many novices lack financial training but often mistakenly engage in leveraged trading or futures markets in their quest to make money, facing high risks without psychological preparation. This type of user is the one that most needs Hoc-Trade’s assistance.
Jonas firmly believes that Hoc-Trade can bring more “rational” momentum to the entire crypto investment environment, stating, “Technically, everyone is quite similar, but why do over 90% of traders incur losses? The key lies in behavior and emotions.”