We were lucky to catch up with Kevin Hamilton recently and have shared our conversation below.
Kevin, so great to have you with us and we want to jump right into a really important question. In recent years, it’s become so clear that we’re living through a time where so many folks are lacking self-confidence and self-esteem. So, we’d love to hear about your journey and how you developed your self-confidence and self-esteem.
That’s a great question, I’ve thought of myself as someone with high confidence and self-esteem. I wasn’t born that way though, I think these qualities were developed through years of practicing Shito Ryu, a Japanese self-defense martial art I started at a very young age. The intense physical and mental challenges of martial arts exposed my strengths and weaknesses, teaching me resilience and self-awareness. Early on, I struggled with basic techniques, but through dedication, meditation, and focused practice, I gradually improved and eventually began winning competitions, including placing 2nd in the Junior Olympics.
This journey taught me not only how to defend myself but also key life lessons: there’s always someone better who can push your boundaries, and real growth comes from acknowledging your limits and learning from those who surpass you. In fact, those are the people that you want to surround yourself with in life. This mindset has been instrumental in building my confidence, both in martial arts and in life, especially when it comes to starting a new company.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
At my core, I’m a builder. I love creating things, whether it’s taking them apart and putting them back together or designing something entirely new. Since entering the world of software engineering during undergrad, I’ve been focused on building software products and never looked back. One of my other passions is the stock market, especially modern capital markets, which I find endlessly fascinating. These two interests converged when I met someone at UCLA Anderson getting my MBA who shared my enthusiasm for both. Together, we launched Tiblio, a company dedicated to changing how individual investors approach high-risk investments, particularly options trading.
What makes Tiblio exciting is the new phase we’re entering, where we’ve shifted from simply providing data to automating the trading process itself. The biggest challenge for high-risk investors, we’ve learned, is their own emotions—hope and fear—leading to poor trading decisions. Our goal is to remove these emotional pitfalls by automating key parts of the trading strategy. The results that we have seen is that when these emotions are removed, the probability that the investor will be successful goes way up. These emotions are the central cause behind the statistics that we all read about, something like 9 out of 10 day traders lose money and the majority of active traders lose money. Hope and Fear drive those losses and It just doesn’t need to be that way.
Through Tiblio Trade Desk, powered by AI, investors can make critical decisions ahead of time, letting the software execute based on predefined rules. This shift in focus is huge, and what’s even more thrilling is that we’ve gained approval to connect Tiblio to four major brokerages: Schwab, TradeStation, Tradier, and TastyTrade. We’re also incorporating AI into the Trade Desk, allowing investors to chat with the AI, get help managing positions, and even send orders directly to their brokerage account through a seamless interface.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
First and foremost, there is no substitute for hard work. Show up early, stay late, and make your presence known. It’s something I’ve always lived by, and it’s something you might hear at a University of Texas Athletics event, but it holds true in life. If I hadn’t worked hard to improve myself in Karate, I wouldn’t have experienced the growth I did. The same applies to any endeavor—without hard work, you risk stagnating and, even worse, letting someone else dictate your future because they’re putting in the effort and making the decisions.
The second most important quality is to take calculated risks. You must put yourself out there, but do so with preparation and understanding to reduce the chance of failure. Risk is subjective—what seems risky to one person might not seem so to another. For example, many view a stable job as less risky than running a business, but if you lose that job, you lose all your income. In contrast, if you own a company with thousands of customers, losing one or two doesn’t hurt as much.
Finally, relationships are key. Much of what we achieve in life is through collaboration. Surround yourself with the right people (people that are better than you), treat them well, and understand that who you choose to build relationships with will impact your success.
Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?
I read a lot, and there are many great books, but the one that has impacted me the most is Ray Dalio’s Principles for Life and Work. I got so into it that I even bought the simpler graphical version and went through it with my children.
The Principles that he describes actually come together to form a process that I use for recognizing reality and then dealing with it. It is a process that we, as founders, go through but really we all go through over and over again in life. It is a process of trial and error of falling down and getting up again and learning from those times when we fall down.
Dalio states this principle as “Truth is the essential foundation for producing good outcomes”.
When we started Tiblio, we had nothing but this idea that the odds were stacked against the little investor. And we set out to solve for that and try to level the playing field as much as possible. It wasn’t until we repeated this cycle of trying something, falling down, learning from it, and then trying again that I ultimately came to realize the truth of the reality that individual investors are at a disadvantage no matter how much data they have. As long as they are making emotion driven decisions while actively managing their investments, the data can do little to help.
According to Dalio, finding that truth actually isn’t enough. Another principle is stated as “Embracing reality”. Once I recognized this truth, I had to embrace the reality of what that meant for Tiblio and our current offering. The reality that we needed to do much more for the individual investor than we were already doing.
By embracing this reality, and moving forward with a new understanding of how to better help investors, we made the decision to go after an even more difficult problem. That is the emotion problem, the Fear and Hope that we feel while investing. And that is how Trade Desk was born. I’m so excited that we’re solving for this now by providing so much more than data and analysis, now we’re providing help with actually operating the trading strategy.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://tiblio.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tiblioinc/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin~hamilton/
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