Transcript of Why Every Major Bank Still Uses 1965 Technology: The Trading 'Rails' Revolution That Changes Everything | Ep 291 with Peter Ashton CEO of Veyra Holdings

Peter, it's really great to have you. We were just talking about how AI is basically transforming every single aspect of our life. I can't wait to dive into what Veyra is doing and how it's transforming trading and I mean, developed by a NASA scientist. Let's just dive into this because I have to understand, what is the difference between artificial intelligence and mathematical intelligence?

Mathematical intelligence is essentially the laws that govern the data. It uses math to calculate and make sure that the laws are absolute and they don't change. Then you can load the data. It's all about data compression. Then artificial intelligence essentially says, based off what I've seen, is to happen. Mathematical intelligence is essentially, These are the systems that I obey, and because of that, this has to happen. It's not very well known. Not many people talk I'm not talking about it because it's not as sexy as talking about AI. But math is essentially the framework, the ground framework that we load data into to get an outcome. That outcome is a projection of what that data set is. If you can compress it and use math to identify what you're looking at, you can actually predict at an incredibly high accuracy rate, like in the markets or in anything, weather patterns, it doesn't matter what it is. You have to use math to take all those data sets, compress it down, and then you can use AI as an overlay. That's really the two difference.

I'm fascinated by the ability that AI can I guess in this instance, mathematical intelligence, what it could do at such a high level. It's definitely smarter than I am. We may not be in what they call AGI, but I feel like it's way smarter than me. When you started going from... You were really into sports, division one football player, and then you started getting into this and learning about mathematical intelligence, how was that transition?

It was a hard transition going from playing sports my entire life. Then that being done, and then you don't really know what to do. I actually had a venture capital firm in 2020 for about two years. My business partner was the founder of Funimation, and they created Dragon Ball Z. Because of that and that partnership, I was able to go find really cool founders and really cool people building disruptive technologies. I found that everybody was trying to find a way to predict the markets a couple of years ago. These were people having these cool technologies to predict what Tesla is going to do tomorrow or NVIDIA is going to do tomorrow. But no one really had the right testing or the right technology to do it. That's when I found a guy that I ran across, and he had this technology that was built in the early mid to late '80s, and he was a NASA scientist. He was a NASA scientist, and he used aerospace missile identification technology to modify it for the markets. All you do is he built an operating system where you basically load data of a given symbol the history of a symbol.

You can use that to predict where that symbol is going to go in the future. That was my first, this is cool.

It's crazy because most people think, Hey, I was invented, ChatGPT. Not that it's been around for 70 years, and things from the '80s are even more relevant now than ever. What type of result It's like, what were you seeing? Because this is something I've been very, very interested, and I've been waiting for this, waiting for something to come out like this. I'm really big in the markets. And of course, like you're saying, I've been thinking, how can AI, how can automation in these things have a great positive impact for people like myself? What type of results, what were you seeing as you started to use this technology?

We didn't want to look at have AI tell me what to invest in? That's what a lot of people are trying to do. We wanted to find and use data. Not so much... All the data that we're using, you can see in a five minute, what's called time series stacking. You stack one time frame on top of one another for whatever symbol you want to trade in the market. You get a higher accuracy when multiple time frames line up. When you can predict in the next five minutes, 15, 30 hour, 240 minutes, and you can project out in advance. You have this alignment. It's really weird, but it's really cool when you see the alignment, and it will tell you when to make a trade and when to not make a trade. We took that and I started testing it myself. Granted, in the beginning, I lost a lot of money. You have to test it and see what works and what doesn't work. We found that people just want a simplistic way of, Tell me what to buy and tell me when to sell. If you don't want to do that, just automate the whole thing for me.

We wanted to tailor this type of trading software not to the accredited investors or qualified clients or family offices and so forth. We wanted to tailor it to the general population. Anybody will be able to use our software and trade $100 or $500 or $10,000. You You can just load it into our system, pick what you want to trade, and click Start, and it will auto-trade for you. You're talking about something that has not been available to the public. We're democratizing institutional-level trading products to the general population, and only doing it as a subscription-based system. We don't take any performance. It's all subscription-based.

Yeah, I was going to say, democratize actually came to my mind as you were explaining it. Like you're saying, it's been this thing where the wealthiest of people have access to great smart resources and people, which enables them to be able to do these things in the past. But unless you're at a certain level, it would have been You would have had to do this yourself. I could see where the democratization comes into play. Something, though, that I think is very different among how you are doing business, and that's the amount of cofounders that you have. I believe it's around 9-10 cofounders. I've had great experiences with just one and horrible experiences with just one. But I think it's your CEO has raised over $130 billion on Wall Street. One of your cofounders played Major League Baseball for over a decade. How did this all come about?

I'm very good at doing just a few things, and I'm trying to triple down on those things. The team that I brought, they all care about this idea of making the un wealthy wealthy. They've spent the last 20, 30 years of their careers making the rich richer, and the gap is getting larger and larger. When I was able to cast this vision to them of building something that anybody brother, sister, cousin, friends of friends can click and download and trade and make high returns with no catch, just you pay your subscription fee, that resonated with a lot of these people. In order to scale quickly, I needed to bring in a team and basically gave them equity of the company in order to help me build it. They all have their boundaries. Everybody has ideas, but the vision is still the vision. You can have ideas, but you can't change the future trajectory of the business because that's what we all came together to do. Yes, we have nine plus cofounders, essentially. But the vision that I cast it, that's the direction we're all moving together.

I could see the more ambassadors you have of your company, the more people rooting for you, the more people that have skin in the game, it's going to enable you, like you're saying, to scale and grow. How big do you think that this company could go? What is your long-term vision?

When we started, we started the company six months ago, right around six months ago. I was going to fund the business, and then it got to a point where we needed to bring on more and more people. We decided to do a small capital raise. We decided to raise a two and a half million at a $50 million valuation. The reason why we did that was we established a very strong distribution channel where this company, they essentially market and they launch newsletters that capture customers that we can market our product directly to them. We decided We're excited to partner together and do an equity swap to establish our distribution channel. We're gaining 20,000 people a day in those newsletters. We're at 550,000 currently in our network. If we do just a simple conversion. Our flagship product to anybody can see the future direction of whatever symbol they want to trade. No automation, just simple. That's 499 a month. There's It doesn't cost that much. If we do a 3% conversion on 550,000, that's a lot of recurring revenue. All we need is about 15,000 to 20,000 people paying 500 bucks a month, and we can sell the business for a billion dollars.

That was the metric around the valuation side, how big it can go. I think it can go to 100,000 people using our product because it's just so simple. I I want the peace of mind knowing what my portfolio is going to do in the future. I'll pay 500 bucks a month to essentially have confidence that it's going to trend in whatever direction that I'm going, either long or short.

Yeah, I like how it sounds like you looked at the end result, and then you created the math to get there. Then you're like, Okay, in order for me to get to a billion sale, I need to do all these things in the middle to get there. If I want to that, that means I need to partner and those things. How is that? Because I'm with you. I feel like lead generation, like traditional lead generation is becoming harder and harder. I feel like there's just so much noise on How many LinkedIn messages do you get a day? Or now there's AI is automating so much email, so I'm getting like a million emails every day if someone tries to sell something. I feel like from an app perspective, a company that collaborating with these types of partnerships might be the best thing that most people can do. What is your thought around just how noisy just all lead generation seems to be getting and how partnerships can play into helping anyone who makes an app become successfully hopeful.

Each lead generation caters to a select group of people. If someone messages me on LinkedIn, Hey, I can generate 25 leads to you. Well, That's great, but they don't know what my company does or my product is. They just message me and message you probably and say, Hey, I can generate 25. Who are those leads? What do they do? I think you have to understand your target market. Most of the time, SaaS companies, it takes between two and three pivots to establish your go-to-market strategy. You pivot one time, and then a lot of times you have to raise additional dollars to hit that. It's hard to to find that product market fit. What you do is you have to talk to your customers. You have to talk to the people that are using your product to refine it and tailor it. We decided to go down the route of forming strong partnerships with companies to scale faster. Forget all the equity, forget all the revenue streams, forget all that. If you're building a business for enterprise value, none of that matters as long as you book all the revenue. As long as you can just the revenue and drive enterprise value, it doesn't matter about how much equity you have because a small piece of a large company is better than a large piece of a small company.

That's the route we went, and it's going to pay off quite a lot because we're looking at January, February, March, really driving in and launching these products to people and have an awesome 2026 year for us.

Do you think that AI is going to allow more people to get into business? Or I guess, and or do you think AI is just going to create a massive amount of competition?

I think both. With all the competition comes a lot of new businesses, but everybody's in the AI space. They're all running on old traditional rails. All the AI, all the quants, there's really only been three iterations since 1822. We're that third of rails. I call them rails because all this is built on math. 1822, Joseph Fourier built Fourier Transform. 1965, they built a faster version, and that's been it. All the quants, all the major financial firms, everybody in the world are using these old rails, but the original rails that were built in 1965 were made to use for computers. Well, now you have algorithmic trading systems. It's in this age of automation. Well, those old rails are slow now. That's why there's so many AI companies popping up is because there's gaps in the market. There's gaps in this. People are, Oh, I'll just create an AI company because it's easy to do. I think there's a lot of noise. If you get down to it, if you can build new rails that everybody can now use that's faster, you eliminate those gaps in the market, which means there's less companies out there and the markets become less saturated.

What you just said, I had no idea. That's how the intricacies worked or behind the scenes. So thank you for sharing that. I guess we'll see in a year, two, three years, all the explosion of companies that started 2024, 2025, maybe even 2026, if they're still around as the competition. Plus, the technology, it's like Gemini just announced version 3, which is faster than ChatGPT, faster. It's like every two weeks, there's some advancement in some LLM or something coming out. Just overall. It's what an exciting space. I really love what you do. I've been waiting and waiting for something to come out that you're doing that I can implement. Let's say it's somebody like myself and I want to get started. I know, like you said, it's not something... It's a few hundred dollars, and I think this could be something really beneficial for me. How can I get started?

If you go to our website, it's veraholdings. Ai, you can get started. We're going to be launching a series of products over the next six months that are tailored to the everyday person who wants to make money in the markets by trading $100, $200, $500, $10,000. There's a limit, but from that side, as you go to our website, you sign up and you have access to all of our products. You could pick and choose what you want to trade, or you can trade yourself by using our charts. It's pretty simple.

Well, Peter Ashton, CEO of Avera AI. Super excited. I was saying earlier, I love the background. I really thought you had a fake background. I need to get that. I need to get the TV behind me. It looks amazing. Really excited about what you're doing. I learned a lot today. I'd never heard of mathematics intelligence. I didn't know about the rails. I'm learning a ton by talking to very intelligent people like yourself, and I'm excited. After you sell for a billion dollars, come back, and I want to know what life is like post-retirement. But thank you so much, by the way, for joining us today.

Thank you. I appreciate it.