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Why Every Major Bank Still Uses 1965 Technology: The Trading 'Rails' Revolution That Changes Everything | Ep 291 with Peter Ashton CEO of Veyra Holdings
00:18:00
In this revealing episode, Peter Ashton—former Division 1 football player turned CEO of Veyra Holdings—unveils how a NASA scientist's 1980s aerospace missile identification technology is being transformed into a trading platform that could democratize wealth creation. From explaining the critical difference between mathematical intelligence and artificial intelligence to building a company with nine co-founders united by one mission, Peter shares the unconventional path to making institutional-level trading accessible to anyone with $100 and a dream.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:01]
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- [01:35]
Podcast Host
So Peter, it's really great to have you. We were just talking about how AI is basically transforming every single aspect of our life and I can't wait to dive into what Vera is doing and how it's transforming trading and I mean developed by a NASA scientist. So let's just dive into this because I have to understand what is the difference between artificial intelligence and mathematical intelligence.
- [02:05]
Peter Ashton
Yeah, math. Mathematical intelligence is essentially the laws that govern the data. So it uses math to calculate and make sure that the laws are absolute and they don't change. Then you can load the data. So it's all about data compression and then artificial intelligence. Right. Essentially says based off what I've seen is likely to happen and mathematical intelligence is essentially these are the systems that I obey and because of that this has to happen. So it's not very well known. Not many people talk about it because it's not as sexy as, you know, talking about AI, but math is Essentially the, the framework, the ground framework that we load data into to get an outcome. And that outcome is a projection of what that data set is. And as 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, you know, like in the markets or in anything, weather patterns or. It doesn't matter what it is. You have to use math, right, to take all those data sets, compress it down, and then you can use AI as an overlay. So that's really the 2 difference.
- [03:26]
Podcast Host
I'm fascinated by the ability that AI can do, I guess in this instance, mathematical intelligence, what it could do at such a high level that it's definitely smarter than I am. We may not be in what they call AGI, right. But I feel like it's way smarter than me. So what when you started going from, you know, you were a really Into Sports, Division 1 football player, and then you started getting into this and learning about mathematical intelligence. How was that transition?
- [03:58]
Peter Ashton
You know, it was, it was a hard transition going from, you know, playing sports my entire life, right. And then, you know, that, that being done and then you don't really know what to do. So I actually had a venture capital firm in 2020 for about two years, and my business partner was the founder of Funimation and they created Dragon Ball Z. And so because of that and that partnership, I was able to go find really cool founders and really cool people building disruptive technologies. And I found that everybody was trying to find a way to predict the markets, right. You know, a couple years ago. So these are people, you know, you know, having these cool technologies to predict, you know, what Tesla's going to do tomorrow or Nvidia is going to do tomorrow. But it wasn't. No one really had the right testing or the right technology to do it. And 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 and he used aerospace missile identification technology to modify it for the markets. And all you do is he built an operating system where you basically load data of a given symbol, right? The history of a day of a symbol, right? And you can use that to predict where that symbol is going to go in the future. And that was like my first, like, this is cool.
- [05:29]
Podcast Host
It's crazy because most people think like AI was invented, you know, ChatGPT. Not that it's, you know, been around for 70 years and, and things from the 80s are even more relevant now than ever. When you, what, what like type of results, 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, you know, I, I've been thinking like, how can AI, you know, how, how can automation and these things have a great positive impact for people like myself? So what type of results, what were you seeing as you started to use this technology?
- [06:13]
Peter Ashton
Yeah, it's, we didn't want to look at like have AI tell me what to invest in. Like that was, that's what a lot of people are trying to do. We wanted to find and use data so, you know, not so much all the data that we're using you can see in a five minute, what's called time series stacking. So you stack one time frame on top of one another for whatever symbol you want to trade in the market and you get a higher accuracy when multiple time frames line up.
- [06:42]
Podcast Host
Right.
- [06:43]
Peter Ashton
And so when you can predict in the next five minutes, 15, 30 hour, you know, 240 minutes and you can project, project out in advance and you have this like alignment. It's a, it's a very, 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. And so we took that and I started testing it myself. Granted in the beginning I lost a lot of money. So you have to like test it and see what works and what doesn't work. And we found that people just want a simplistic way of tell me what to buy and tell me when to sell.
- [07:20]
Podcast Host
Right.
- [07:20]
Peter Ashton
And if you don't want to do that, just automate the whole thing for me. So we wanted to tailor this type of trading software not to the accredited investors or you know, qualified clients or family offices and so forth. We wanted to tailor it to the general population and so anybody you know will be able to use our software with and trade $100 or $500 or $10,000. Right. You could 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 institution level trading products to the general population and not, and only doing it as a subscription based system. So we don't take any performance. It's all subscription Based.
- [08:07]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I was going to say de. Democratize actually came to my mind as you were explaining it. And it gives like you're saying. It's. It's kind of 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. It would have been hard, right? You would have had to do this yourself. So I could see where the democratization comes into play. So something, though, that I think is very different among how you are doing business. And that's the amount of co founders that you have. I know, I believe it's like around 9 to 10 co founders. And I mean, I've had, you know, 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 co founders played Major League Baseball for over a decade. How did this all come about?
- [09:13]
Peter Ashton
I'm very good at doing just a few things, right. And I'm trying to triple down on those things. Right. And the, the team that I brought, they all care about this idea of, of making the unwealthy wealthy, right? They've spent the last 10, 20, 30 years of their careers making the rich richer. And it's your. The gap is getting larger and larger, right? And so when I was able to cast this vision to them of building something that, you know, anybody's brother, sister, cousin, you know, friends of friends can. Can click and download and trade and make high returns, right, with no catch, just you pay your subscription fee, that resonated with a lot of these people. And so I had to, in order to scale quickly, right? I needed to bring in a team and basically gave them equity of the company in order to help me build it. And so they all have their boundaries, right? No, nobody has. Everybody has ideas, but the vision is still the vision, right? You can have ideas, but you can't change the future trajectory of the business, Right? Because that's what we're all came together to do. So, yes, we have like nine plus co founders, essentially. But the vision that I kind of casted, like that's the direction we're all moving together.
- [10:35]
Podcast Host
I mean, that's, you know, I could see the more ambassadors you have of your company, the more people rooting for you.
- [10:46]
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- [11:15]
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- [12:12]
Podcast Host
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? You know, what is, what is your long term vision?
- [12:24]
Peter Ashton
So when we started, we started the company six months ago, right around six months ago, and I was going to fund the business and then it got to a point where we needed to bring on more and more people. And so we, we decided to do a small capital raise. So we decided to raise a two and a half million at a $50 million valuation. The reason why we did that was we, we established a very strong distribution channel where this company, they essentially they market and they launch newsletters that capture customers and we can market our product directly to them. And so we decided to partner together as a as and do an equity swap, right, to establish our distribution channel. And we're gaining 20,000 people a day in those newsletters. So we're at 550,000 currently in our network. So if we do just a simple conversion, right, you know, our flagship product to, you know, anybody can see the future direction of whatever symbol they want to trade, right? No automation, just simple, that's 499amonth. So it's very, you know, it doesn't cost that much. And if we do a 3% conversion on 550,000, that's a lot of recurring revenue. And so, you know, we, all we need is about 15 to 20,000 people paying 500 bucks a month and we can sell the business for a billion dollars. So that was the metric around, you know, the valuation side, how big it can go. I think it can go to a hundred thousand people using our product. Because it's just so simple, right? Is, you know, I want the peace of mind, knowing what my portfolio is going to do in the future. So 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.
- [14:10]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I like how you, it's kind of sounds like you, you kind of looked at the end result and then you kind of created the math to get there. And then you're like, okay, in order for me to get to like a billion sale, I need to do all these things in the middle to get there. And if I want to do that, that means I need to partner and those things. How, 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, you know, how many LinkedIn messages do you get a day? Or now there's, you know, AI is automating so much email. So I'm getting like a million emails every day of someone trying to sell something. So I feel like from a, you know, 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, you know, can play into being to helping anyone who makes an app become successfully hopeful.
- [15:18]
Peter Ashton
Each lead generation caters to a select group of people, right. So if you want, if someone messages me on LinkedIn, they're like, Hey, I can generate 25 leads to you. Well, that's great. But they're just, they don't know what my company does or my product is, so they just message me and message you probably and say, hey, I can generate 25. Who are those leads? What do they do? So I think you have to understand your target market, right? And most of the time, SaaS, companies, it takes between two and three pivots to establish your go to market strategy. Right? You pivot one time and then a lot of times you have to raise additional dollars. Right. To hit that. So it's hard to find that product market fit. And 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. And so we decided to go down the route of forming strong partnerships with companies to scale faster. Right? So forget all the equity, forget all the revenue streams, forget all that, right? If you're building a business for enterprise value, none of that matters as long as you book all the revenue. So you, as long as you can just book the revenue and drive enterprise value, 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 smaller company. So 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 this, these products to people and have an awesome 2026 year for us.
- [16:54]
Podcast Host
Do you think that AI is going to allow more people to get into business? Or do you. Or I guess and. Or do you think AI is just going to create a massive amount of competition?
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Peter Ashton
I think both. With all the competition comes a lot of new businesses. But everybody's in the AI space, right? They're all running on old, like old traditional Rails. So all the AI, all the quants, you know, there's really only been three iterations since 1822, right? And so we're that third of Rails, I call them Rails, because they're built on. All this is built on math. So 1822, Joseph Furier built Fury A Transformation. 1965, they built the faster version and that's been it. So all the quants, all the major financial firms, everybody in the world are using these old Rails. But the original Rails and that were built in 1965 were made to use for computers. Well now you have algorithmic trading systems, right? You've got, it's in this, this age of automation. Well, those old rails are slow now. And so that's why there's so many AI companies popping up, is because there's, there's gaps in the market, there's gaps in this. So people, oh, I'll just create an AI company, right? Because it's easy to do. So I think it's, there's a lot of noise, right? And 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, there's less companies out there and the, the markets become less saturated.
- [18:34]
Podcast Host
Man, I did I didn't even. What you just said, I had no idea, like 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 or 2025, maybe even 2026, if they're still around as the competition. Plus, I mean, the technology just, it's like, you know, Gemini just announced version three, which is faster than, you know, chat GBT faster. It's like every two weeks there's some advancement in some LLM or something coming out, just overall. So it's. What an exciting space. I mean, I really love what you're doing. I've been waiting and waiting for something to come out that you're doing that I can implement. So let's say it's somebody like myself and I want to get started. I know like you said, it's not something that it's, it's a few hundred dollars and I think this could be something really beneficial for me. How can I get started?
- [19:36]
Peter Ashton
Yeah. So if you go to our website, so it's Vera holdings AI, you can get started. And 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.
- [19:52]
Podcast Host
Right, Right.
- [19:53]
Peter Ashton
By trading 100, 200, $510,000. Right. There's, there's, there's a limit, but, you know, from that side is you go to our website, you sign up and you have access to all of our products. You can pick and choose what you want to trade or you can trade yourself by using our charts. It's pretty simple.
- [20:10]
Podcast Host
Well, Peter Ashton, CEO of Vera AI. Super excited. I love, 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 never heard of mathematic 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.
- [20:52]
Peter Ashton
Thank you. I appreciate it.
- [20:58]
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- [21:30]
Podcast Closing Host
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